The maple leaves that I had collected from Tolstoy’s garden proved to be an eloquent metaphor of the Moscow we saw in those weeks of our visit. It was with genuine relief that we joined in the cheers of the passengers when the London-bound plane took off in a swirling snowstorm in mid-September. Like the snow, the autumn leaves were harbingers of winter in a country where all those freedoms of speech, expression, thought, movement which we took for granted were permanently frozen. Yet their vivid colours sang of our irrepressible friends, those courageous people stranded in that political wasteland. As winter approached in Cambridge, we realized that together with the leaves and the souvenirs, the wooden dancing bears and hand-painted china, we had brought back with us an unwelcome legacy of Soviet oppression. For several weeks after our return, we were unable to communicate freely in our own home for fear that the walls might be listening to us. If this was a measure of the psychological pressure that our friends lived under all the time, our admiration for them could only increase. Thrilled as we were to be back with our children, such a realization was sobering. How, we asked, would we cope in those circumstances?
— Travelling to Infinity (Jane Hawking), Loc. 2756–64