Cars of Hawking's family

"He was ringing from Cambridge – as usual, for fourpence – to tell me that he had been awarded a Commendation Prize, worth £100, in the Gravity competition. I danced round Mrs Dunham’s kitchen in raptures. Stephen’s hundred pounds – added to the two hundred and fifty pounds which my father had been accumulating for me in National Savings and which he had promised to give me on my twenty-first birthday – would enable us to pay off Stephen’s overdraft and buy a car. Later that summer, just before the wedding, Stephen’s close friend in Trinity Hall, Rob Donovan, negotiated a very favourable deal for us with his father, a car dealer in Cheshire. We had the choice of two vehicles: one, a gleaming, red-painted, open-topped 1924 Rolls Royce, was tantalizing but quite impractical and rather beyond our means; at the other end of the scale, there was a red Mini on offer.

Reluctantly Stephen had to concede that the Mini was better suited to our purse and to our

requirements, especially since one of those small clouds looming on my horizon was ominously

marked “driving test”..... When finally in the autumn of 1965 I passed the dreaded test, it may have been because my bête noire, the chief examiner, was reported to be in hospital.

All those successes and celebrations in the early months of 1965 clearly marked our way forwards,

with the result that my concerns became more intensely focused on Cambridge and the wedding.

Inevitably a distance was developing between me and my friends and contemporaries, both my

student friends in Westfield and my old dancing and tennis friends in St Albans."

"I scarcely dared look at the road in front while Stephen, on
afford to live dangerously since fate had already dealt him such a cruel blow. This however was of scant reassurance to me, so I secretly vowed that I would travel home by train. I was definitely beginning to have my doubts about this supposedly fairy-tale experience of a May Ball."
(Ford Zephyr car)
Travelling to Infinity - Jane Hawking

"Я едва осмеливалась смотреть вперед на дорогу в то время как Стивен, мог
позволить себе жить опасно, т.к. судьба уже нанесла ему такой жестокий удар. Это, однако, едва придавало мне уверенности, так что я тайно пообещала себе, что буду добираться домой на поезде. И меня определенно одолевали сомнения по поводу этого, якобы сказочного приключения, на Майском Бале."
(Ford Zephyr автомобиль)