Even at school, they called him Einstein

FAMILY life in the middle-class household of Frank and Isobel Hawking was quiet and studious, but also odd to the point of eccentricity. Both of them were ferociously bright Oxford graduates ( he in medicine, she in PPE).

The eldest of their four children, Stephen was born in 1942 in Oxford, where the Hawkings had taken refuge from the Blitz. They returned to North London after the war, where young Stephen went to a progressive nursery school and didn’t learn to read until he was eight.

They then moved to St Albans, just outside London, to a shabby house that never got the fixing up it needed because money was tight and, anyway, they had more important matters on their minds.

In the basement, they kept bees. In the garden greenhouse they made fireworks. ‘We were definitely regarded as eccentric,’ Stephen confessed in his autobiography.

Stephen was undoubtedly clever but not, it seems, in a precocious, child-genius way. At the independent St Albans School, his classmates nicknamed him ‘Einstein’ — though one year he was third from bottom in his class. On his own admission, his writing was untidy and his work often sloppy. As he matured, however, he began to excel in mathematics and science.

But he was no desk-bound swot, tied to his studies. He delighted in dancing. He and his sister, Mary, loved climbing and devised various unorthodox entry routes into the three-storey family home.

He revelled in board games and, with school friends, made up new games of their own. They also built a computer from clock parts.

His father — a respected medical researcher — was keen for Stephen to follow his footsteps into medicine.

But his son had other ideas, prompted by his mother who encouraged him and his siblings to lie in the garden on summer nights to stare up at the stars. ‘Stephen always had a strong sense of wonder,’ she recalled. ‘I could see that the stars would draw him.’