The past is a foreign country, and we cannot get there from here!

Many thanks for all of you who have logged on to 'The Prefab Files' (especially
to those who sent in their comments).

The plan is for 'The Prefab Files' to vanish into cyberspace soon.
Maybe the novel blog will be re-configured one day and will make
some kind of return.

Till, then, prefab buddies, adios!
......................................................

While the prefab estate had a distinctly egalitarian feel to it, the same could not be said of the wider society. Within three seconds of someone opening their mouth you would have a "good ideal" of the kind of school they had attended and their parents' occupations. (How things have changed since those dark 1950s' days! Nowadays working out someone's class background can take as long as six seconds.)
It is hard to imagine any of the debates which surfaced in the kitchens of the prefabs ever being engaged in today. For example in prefab number twelve - residence of Pete O'Clarke's old man - an epic debate once took place on the question of whether members of the working class were better persons - kinder, less likely to be selfish, and more concerned with the public good - than members of the middle class. (It had to be agreed in advance that the Swileys of prefab number twenty-six would be 'de-proletarianised' and placed in a 'miscellaneous' class category for the debate's duration. Otherwise the central proposition would have been shot to pieces within half a minute.)
Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one always relished taking a vigorously workerist line on issues of social controversy. Both Dai and Karl Marx were wary of the lumpen proletariat - "the dangerous class" - but he always had some complementary things to say about the upper class. (His Platonic friendship with a lady who lived in an exquisite Italian Villa could well have been a factor here.)
The segment of society Dai really had it in for was the middle-class. Or to be more precise he was highly critical of what he called "the petty bourgeois rump component of the middle-class", the types who had "managed to worm their way into supervisory office-type jobs and go round thinking they are a cut above everyone else." This stance caused some amusement among other prefab residents, not least because they felt that Dai himself had managed to "worm himself" into a supervisory office-type job. And Dai's next door neighbour - the string-vest-wearing-brown-ale-bottle-drinking 'Desperate' Dan at prefab number two - was always saying that Dai "represented the quintessence" of the petty bourgeois rump social type he so despised. "Ever since Lectic took that literature course with the Incredibly Rapid Results Correspondence College he has gone round thinking he is the incarnation of Charles 'Fleur de mal' Baudelaire.'

While sat in the restaurant car of the Paris-Milan express the old man had the idea of writing an autobiography that would be called Being A Labourer Myself. Soon he would be checking into the Hotel Aosta in the centre of Milan, calling in at the city's Derro Enamels office, and then heading down to Naples and the tiny village of Casanouvo for a two-month stint of furnace bricklaying. Untold numbers of labourers born around 1915 must played with the idea of penning their own 'what-it-was-like-being-not-far-from-the-bottom' life-story. Usually such projects fell at the first hurdle and they were unable to come up with a title which rang true. The old man found a title with what a future Twiverton Literary Supplement reviewer would call "consummate ease", but subsquent life-story events were to blow him off course and the project was never completed. No bookshop shelves groan under the weight of this international enamel furnace bricklaying labourer's autobiography. ("And groan they most certainly would!" says TLS reviewer Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic, resident of prefab number one.)
With his Paris-Milan express restaurant car meal all but finished the old man caught sight of the breathtaking beauty of Lake Como. He felt its shimmering surface beam this message towards him: "A moment is passing in the history of the world of international enamel furnace bricklayers: capture it before it is too late!" A fraction of a moment later the American business executive from Omaha who was sat opposite him in the diner set off a conversation with the following words:

"Four of us are sat round this table. We are travelling on one of the crack trains of the Continent. A day is going to come when all these coaches will be scrap and dust and all the people laughing in this diner will have passed to ashes."

After taking a drink from his bottle of Italian beer (he hated the way plastic cups took away the purity of the taste) the old man said: "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die!"
"The man sat on the old man's right then said: "I run a law firm in New York city. What do you guys do?" The cigar smoker on the Omaha executive's left replied: "Right now I am just touring around. But back in the States I make movies." The three members of The Trans-National Global Elite then looked at the man armed with the bottle of Italian beer who had flecks of cement dust embedded in his finger-nails. In what a TLS reviewer would one day call a 'Carl Sandburg' breakthrough moment in the history of unfinished books, the old man stared out at the shimmering beauty of the northern Italian lake and said: "Being a labourer myself."

The green hills of Lansdown look down on our Somerset prefab, and somewhere beyond them are the imagined blue-tinted hills of the Welsh border. When the summer holidays come we get on the train for Newport, wait for the valleys bus outside Newport station, and an hour later we are staring at the culinary treasure trove that is Auntie Eileen's larder in Talywain. "Talywain, Oh Talywain!" as the poets of tomorrow will one day say. Whisper that name in prefab number twenty-four and toes start to tingle, pulses quicken, and heads turn giddy at the thought of double servings of bread and butter! "It is no accident" (to use Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic's favourite phrase) that both 'Holiday' and 'Talywain' are three-syllable words. Better-off kids whose parents could afford to pay for a holiday (and who ended up being booted out of Weymouth boarding houses at half past nine on rain swept mornings and told not to return until tea-time) must have raged with fury at the thought of our lingering in bed in Talywain and gazing out at the hill sides. No singing in riverside pubs for them , no passing the ball up and down Pontypool's famous rugby pitch, no throwing stones down disused mine shafts and holding one's breath as they send echos down towards the centre of the earth, no late-night tales of the ghost dogs that roamed down Monmouthshire's country lanes at dusk!
'Italians in the rain' (who turned out not to be Italian at all) were always singing arias from Verdi operas while digging holes in the roads and pavements of Talywain. The holiday excitement did not stop when you went indoors. Once the thrill of the journey from Somerset and the anticipation of what was in store reached such a crescendo of expectancy that I was unable to do what was discretely called my 'number two'. "Has he been yet?" my cousin kept on saying. Determined to bring about what is now called 'closure' on my embarrassing predicament I marched into the lavatory (never call it "the toilet" said the son of the slick salesman who lives in the corner prefab), dramatically slammed the door shut, and simulated momentous success and supreme relief with an emphatic pull of the chain and an ear-piercing shout of: "And about time!"
This cunning stratagem might have worked in sleepy Somerset, but in the high-oxygen terrain of the South Wales valleys they know their Von Clausewitz to their finger tips. My cousin had placed his ear against the lavatory door. "He didn't go, Auntie!" he shouted out in triumph as he raced into the sitting-room. "He just pretended!"

"That is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again." (A.E. Housman - 1859-1936.)

The creepiest place you could get to from our prefab estate was the dark stretch of river in the old industrial part of Twiverton. This is where the Silk-Farr mill once stood. The river is
hemmed in on all sides by crumbling brick-lined walls, and the currents swirl round in a demented panic to escape.

'The water is not lovely, though it is dark and deep
And I have promises to keep.'

(One of the first promises is to go somewhere else.) Just because this stretch of the river gives off an aura of dread and menace some kids cannot stop themselves being drawn towards it. They want to tempt the gods by engaging in all kinds of reckless acts of bravado. Even the iron bridge near-by has a sinister look which gets into the psyches of even unadventurous types and makes them want to dice with fate. (They should re-name it Thanatos Bridge but this would only edge some people on.) Ronnie Rogers from prefab number forty-three claims to have cycled across the high metal arch of the bridge from one side of the river to the other at least a dozen times! (The arches which span the bridge are no more than three inches wide and give bicycle tyres no grip at all.) "Any of you lot coming down to the iron bridge!" he shouts to us as he heads on his bike towards the grime-encrusted railway arch by the Lower Bristol Road.
Perhaps Ronnie does cycle across the arches of the iron bridge (although we suspect it is another
'Walter Mitty' fantasy.) Members of both the weightlifting and the philosophy clubs do not want to know. This murky stretch of water has ruined enough lives as it is. We count our lucky stars that we do not live close to it, and keep our fingers crossed that we will not have to face it until we are ready for the fight.

"Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and turns of the months and years, like a crouching beast in the jungle." (Henry James.)

To get a panoramic view of our prefab estate you have to climb on to the roof of the yellow corrugated coal shed. Do not be taken in by the myth that there is little to see round here - especially on a Saturday! In the space of a couple of hours a super-charged trolley cart will race down the back road. A home made space rocket bursts into flames and stays obstinately rooted to Planet Earth. The two kids who made fall out and start wrestling on the green. Copper Jones gets off his bike, adjusts his cycle clips, and surveys his troubled terrain. A queue forms up by the Co-op van ("Share number 24419!") The oil-smeared face of Pete O'Clarke's old man looks up from the underside of his motor-bike side car. Ronnie Rogers' mum hangs up her seventh load of the day on the washing line. One of Semprini's Serenades crackles from a wireless set. An angry hound stares down at the chicken hut in Martin Filligan's smallholding and licks its lips. A roar goes up from Twiverton Park as the ball thuds into Merthyr Tydfil's net. (It is followed by groan - the goal has been disallowed!)
Look up to the hills of Lansdown. A cloud is giving a tentative caress to William Beckford's Tower. Beckford (1760-1844) inherited a fortune from his slave-based sugar plantations in Jamaica. He wrote the Gothic novel 'Vathek' (1786). No wonder the caress given by the cloud to Beckford's tower is a tentative one. No wonder the light green speckled hedge in our front garden is biding its time.

Copper Jones turned up late on Friday night at 'Ossie' Oster's place in prefab number seventeen. The family was woken up and given the bad news. 'Ossie' found it hard to make any sense of the news, and Copper Jones wondered if he had understood. Copper Jones was what Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) called 'a messenger'.

Walter Benjamin:
"A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead. For the community of all the dead is so immense that even he who only reports death is aware of it."

Similar knocks to those made by 'Copper Jones' are being made on unsuspecting doors every night of every week. Road 'accidents' have come to be regarded as some kind of law of nature. They are the modern day equivalent to being savaged by wolves in the dark forests of ancient times. (Except that today's 'wolves' have been fashioned and designed and glamourised by humans themselves.)
Some tricky logistical problems come with death in a prefab. When a coffin is wheeled in people areuncertain about where to put it. The hall is too small. the kitchen is out. The biggest room - the sitting room - is the obvious place, but place the coffin here and everyone can feel overwhelmed by the grief of it all. So it will often go into one of the two bedrooms. In 'Ossie' Oster's case it was placed in the bedroom where the ghost stories were once told, where you could hear the sound of trains hiss their way through the tunnel in the woods, where the paper-thin prefab walls acted as antennae into the surrounding darkness.

In the summer of 1954 every adult male on our estate had a job apart from the old man. A manager at the Derro Company had spoken to him in a manner which had offended his dignity.
Without cementing another furnace brick into place the old man picked up his bricklaying trowel and was off to Milan airport. "I have won a fortune of contracts for Derro and they talked to me like that!" he said as blew a breath of cool air over the plate of onion soup he had just brewed up. Another small footnote had been added to that massive tome Capital Versus Labour which drips from every pore with pain and hurt pride.
The old man's self-employed national insurance status meant that his eligibility for dole money was all but non-existent. In any case, claiming dole money had never been his style. So he battened down the hatches, dug deep into his financial reserves, sat in the armchair scratching the back of his head, and would stroll down to The Old Crown to work out how on earth he could make an egress from this perilous situation.
On Sunday evenings I would be taken to The Old Crown as well and sat down in the back room to study the stuffed fox in the glass box and listen to the ticks of the large black clock. The old man would ferry in supplies of ginger beer and cheddar cheese straws while engaging in scientific discussions with The Inventor. Despite being bald The Inventor managed to project the classic Albert Einstein wild hair look (he had lost his hair after an experiment had gone badly wrong.) Ever since 1945 The Inventor from Camelot Green had been battling away to get his invention patented. When drinkers in the saloon bar crowded around him and asked what this invention was he would first take them on a brisk e = mc squared theoretical detour. He would tell them that the universe is 14 billion years old, the solar system is five million years old, and that the galaxy measures 100,000 light years across ("with more stars than grains of sand.") He would point out that prior to the Cambrian Explosion of 536 million years ago our ancestors were "mere organisms in the sea." Pausing for a drink from his glass he would then point out that humans did not appear until two million years ago, and that our species' big breakthrough came 70,000 years ago with the invention of tools. The Inventor's introductory lecture would end with him saying: "And tools are my domain!"
The tool The Inventor had invented was an elastic device which stopped pyjama trousers from rolling up legs during the night. Most people were stunned and disappointed when they heard this. They felt it was something of a let-down. Yet The Inventor deserves some credit. Here was someone who refused to have his spirit crushed by the weight of all of the innovations and advances and works of genius and history-changing discoveries that had gone before him. Someone like Georg Simmel would have viewed his defiant never-say-die tenacity as somewhat
remarkable.

Georg Simmel (1858-1918):

"Here in buildings and in educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technique, in the formations of social life and in the concrete institutions of the State is to be found such a richness of crystallizing, depersonalized cultural accomplishments that the personality can, so to speak, scarcely maintain itself in the face of it."

When Ronnie Rogers enrolled for a course at the local Mechanics Institute in 1963 he was stunned to see that the chap standing ahead of him in the queue (the son of a naval officer who would make his mark as a Professor of Dilettante Studies at the University of the North Circular) was wearing a pair of jeans. In those days there was much uncertainty about whether turning up at a public institution in jeans was a way of 'taking the piss' or constituted the quintessence of cool. Ronnie was even more taken aback when the cool dude jeans wearer
introduced himself and shook hands. (Even today suit-wearing academics continue to be taken aback when the aristocrat they have invited to give a lecture turns up wearing jeans.)
The zeitgeist of the Mechanics Institute at this time - a heady brew of conservative traditionalism, anarcho-Marxism and self-seeking individualism - helped change Ronnie's life for good. He drifted further away from his prefab estate roots and came close to gravitating towards one of those de-centred and deracinated identities which was the cause of much existential anguish and political floundering during the next decades.
Ronnie signed up for the famous 'Bath PPE' course in politics, economics, and philosophy.
(While the 'Oxbridge PPE' opens doors to The Establishment, the 'Bath PPE' opens doors to Drinking Establishments.) Ronnie then went off to the Arty Little Cinema with the naval officer's son to watch Citizen Kane (1941).
Charles Foster Kane was a power-hungry newspaper tycoon with an American passport and a half-concealed Australian identity. In the film's deathbed scene Kane whispers the word 'Rosebud'. 'Rosebud' was the name of the sled he had been playing with as a young child a few moments before his mother called him into the house. He was then sent away from his home, with the beloved sled being left abandoned in the garden.
When the Arty Little Cinema's screening of Citizen Kane ended Ronnie Rogers wondered whether the bearings that had been bestowed on him by a benevolent slice of history might soon be lost. Perhaps his own prefab had been his 'Rosebud'. This feeling of the dye having been cast was to stay with him for years to come.

Prison was Maxim Gorky's university, and the Arty Little Cinema was Ronnie Roger's. Tucked away in the quiet alley that led to the elite weightlifting gym - Le Club Musculation -it opened on the fortieth anniversary of the first public showing of film in Paris in 1896. Ronnie's driving ambition - he called it "the fierce urgency of now" - was to review films in New York for Vanity Fair. He posted a formidable work of fiction (it was called 'My CV') off to America, signed up for
evening classes at the local technical college, bought a duffle coat, drifted along to jazz nights at the Bell Inn, and sipped glasses of barley water in what 'Tubby' Lard called "that citadel of posers" - the Salamander coffee bar - while leafing through a red and white covered 1962 edition of Yevtushenko's poems.
There was one Yevtuschenko poem which held Ronnie Rogers in its grip for the next seven years. In 'Encounter' the poet describes how he was once sat in the aerodrome cafe in Copenhagen, a place where "everything was brilliance and comfort." Then he saw an old man with a white beard (a beard stained with flecks of blood from hundreds of ' I am a hell of a tough guy' hunting expeditions) plough "a furrow through the crowded room." When he reached the bar the old man with a white beard demanded a Russian vodka. He waved "away soda with a 'No'."
The old man was Ernest Hemingway.
Within two months Ronnie Rogers had grown a beard of his own. He strode into the Bell Inn and demanded a Russian vodka. (but had to make do with a pint of scrumpy instead.) Ronnie had to wait for a vodka until another time, but in that moment he knew he had left his beloved Twiverton behind perhaps for good. He had succumbed to the charms, limited as they were, of the arty wing of the neighbouring city's petty bourgeoisie (semi-intellectual segment.)
Residents on the prefab estate furrowed their brows. They could sense he was losing it.

Swansea born Richard 'Beau' Nash (like the old man a couple of centuries later) was a Welshman who took the sleepy backwater of Bath by storm. This dazzling dandy and talented cultural entrepreneur - Beau Nash, not the old man - became Master of Ceremonies in 1704, and over a span of fifty-eight years used his flair, charm and panache to smooth away a few of the rough edges of this brawling/belching/elbow-them-out-of-your-way cut-throat urban jungle.
When an art-deco cinema opened in the city in 1929 it had to be named the Beau Nash. The doormen it employed might have been expected to try and emulate some of the original Master of Ceremonies' qualities of flair and panache. Au contraire! as the slick salesman in prefab number forty-six would be sure to say. So when they overheard 'Tubby' Lard making a joky aside about having plenty of razor blades ready to slash a few of the cinema's seats led to us all being given an immediate life ban. (Unknown to 'Tubby' a band of razor-slashing Teddy Boys had paid a visit to this very cinema just a few hours before!)
This meant our future cinema visits had to be confined to the Fort Rum Cinema (built in 1934 to double up as an air-hanger), the 1930s' constructed Arty Little Cinema and Willowby Road Cinema based in Goldfield Park. (By a strange coincidence George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) mentions a Willowby Road which was "not definitely slummy, only dingy and depressing.") In April 1942 an air-shelter opposite the Willowby Road Cinema took a direct hit in the Bath Blitz and seventeen people were killed. Twenty years later the cinema was bulldozed down and a supermarket was built on its site. Goldfield Park has been on a downward slide ever since.
After hearing about the air shelter bombing 'Tubby' Lard complained of feeling ill whenever he visited the cinema in Willowby Road. He decided to go on long walks in Pennyquick Woods instead. And it was during one of these Pennyquick Woods walks that 'Tubby' first hit on the Buddhist idea of imagining he was watching the movie of his own life. 'Tubby' has been going for long walks and watching this favourite movie ever since.

The 5A bus from Twiverton did not take you to any foreign country. It got as far as the
fountain by the Abbey with a "Water Is Best" inscription carved in stone. From there
members of the leisure class would make their way to the walled garden with exotic plants in Victoria Park, or the eerie echoing canal tunnels in Sydney Gardens, or to a secret path which winds its way up to Sham Castle. If the rain is pouring down they head for the cafe in the Market (where the play-things-close-to-your-chest Yorkshireman presides over the games and toys stall) or to one of the city's four cinemas where - in the early 1960s - there would be a chance of seeing the famous Peter Stuyvessant cigarette advertisement.
Hospital wards have been filled with inmates who chuckle at the recollection of the
advertisement's ersartz glamour! Peter Stuyvessant opened up with zappy fast-paced music and dazzling panoramic shots of beaming faces from glitzy boulevards and smart restaurants in London, Paris, New York and Rome. Pleasure seekers in the cinema's back row would prick up
their ears on hearing the words: "From city after city, people are smoking Peter Stuyvessant!" Lines of leather-clad bikers who remained rooted to their seats when the national anthem was being played would stand solemnly to attention on hearing the Peter Stuyvessant theme music explode from the screen.
'Ossie' Oster - resident of prefab number seventeen - was so taken by this advertisement that he bought three bumper-sized cellophane-wrapped packets of Peter Stuyvessant cigarettes to help light up his family's Christmas festivities. He had no way of knowing that the intended recipient had made a New Year's resolution to give up smoking for good (and that fate had decreed this resolution would be kept.)
For Peter Stuyvessant the future - like the past - had to be a foreign country.

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." This sentence of L.P. (Lesley Pool) Hartley deservedly won him a place in the hall of fame. During our prefab years Hartley was living in a house in Bathford which had once been the residence of the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce and the inventor of the Bath biscuit, Dr Oliver.
Hartley moved to Bathford from London after having been given a hard time by some stand-offish members of the Bloomsbury Group. He made one strategic intervention in local affairs. His novel 'The Boat' had been published in 1949 and he took a special pleasure in boating. What prompted his strategic intervention was an incident on the River Avon. A group of boys started throwing stones at him and his boat. Hartley was so inflamed by the incident that he wrote a letter to his go-between, the editor of the Bath & Wilting. His indignant missive about the boys' behaviour struck a chord with the mood of the time.
When drinkers in Smith's Wine Vaults heard of Hartley's letter they felt that their (never yet exercised) right to take a leisurely and unmolested row down the river had been snatched away. The remark made by one of their party was subsequently quoted in an untypically fierce Bath & Wilting editorial. It said "Those tenth rate punks are at it again!"
The stretch of the river on which L.P. Hartley got stoned is six miles to the east of our estate in Twiverton. This made it impossible for any canards to be hurled at the kids from the prefabs. We do things differently on our estate.

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A film which filtered through the fourth wall of Le Club Musculation and brought the weightlifting session to a halt was Jean Genet's The Balcony. The bull-necked crew-cutted butcher's shop owner who ran the gym said the film represented a bid at "penetrating the mythologies that cloak every regime of power." It was certainly a change from the Jerry Lewis comedies and repeats of the The Dambusters which were the usual film-going fare of the time. We ended up hanging up our dumb-bells and going into the Arty Little Cinema next door to watch the second half. We realised that the cinema screen was directly behind the wall mirror on to which some club members would cast the occasional narcissistic glance.
After the semi-professional weightlifters of Le Club Musculation had finished their bone-crushing work-outs an entire glass of milk (laced with a drop of brandy) and mixed with a couple of raw eggs would be knocked back in a couple of gulps. The squad would then head for home and polish off an under-done steak.
The Arty Little Cinema thrives even to this day, but sadly Le Club Musculation and the
celebrated paper-thin fourth wall are no more. In its place stands a newly-built block of luxury mock neo-Georgian apartments which serve as pied-a'-terres for former hedge fund managers who are lying low. What has not vanished is the distinctive Le Club Musculation demeanour and style, the eye-catching combination of shades, tee-shirts, jeans, light brown ultra-flexible shoes, and crew-cut hair styles that an still be seen in the finest training venues. These are the surface appearances of those who have ventured on to The Balcony of life and penetrates the secrets that lie beyond the Fourth Wall.

When you have one hundred and forty pounds of weights dangling over your head the sounds of hot embraces, husky voices, sighs, panting, thrusts and counter-thrusts can sometimes be a shade distracting. This was Le Club Musculation's big drawback. The elite gym could well have been the only one in England (although maybe not in Wales) where the sound of bodices and silken under-garments being ripped off with great gusto was par for the course when it came to the routine performance of squats, bench presses, and dumb-bell exercises.
Three of the walls of Le Club Musculation were formidable constructions built out of the finest Bath stone. However the fourth wall did not quote fit the bill. The fourth wall was constructed in the classic 1940s' paper-thin prefab tradition. And it was the fourth wall which had the Herculean task of separating Le Club Musculation from the small auditorium of the cinema next door.
Only a handful of risque films were publicly screened in sleepy Somerset towns in the early post-war decades. Managers of the mainstream Beau Nash, Scala, and Odeon cinemas could be relied on to give a thumbs-down to any films which gave off a hint on avante-garde sensibility. Only the Arty Little Cinema was different. And it was the Arty Little Cinema which was the other side of Le Club Musculations' fourth wall.
This meant that just a few slivers of cardboard and crumbling plaster stood between the deep breathing passionate weightlifters who were stretching out their physiques out on Le Club Musculation's sweaty benches and the deep breathing passionate actresses who were stretching out their somewhat more lithe physiques on sweaty Parisian and Stockholm bedsteads on the screen of the Arty Little Cinema. The weightlifters of Le Club Musculation did not have anything against Erotic Sound Effects per se. ("Au contraire!" as the slick salesman who lived in prefab number forty-six in Woodhedge Road would have been the first to say.) What ruffled the weightlifters' feathers was what they called "unexpected trajectories." (i.e. the sudden intersection of a burst of Erotic Sound Effects with a highly-exacting and potentially life-threatening heavy object weight movement.) First-aid records show that hardly a month went by in 1962/1963 without a hyper-ventilating weightlifter losing himself in a world of nubile fantasy and dropping a fifty-pound dumb-bell on another weightlifter's foot. (And on one tragic occasion on another weightlifter's delicate protruding body part.)

Every prefab estate in 1950s' Britain had its Renaissance figure and Pete O' Clarke's old man in prefab number twelve was ours. He cut a dashing figure as he roared off on his motor bike (and side-car) for another gruelling shift at Bath Cabinet Makers. Some other so-called Renaissance figures are little more than image and surface glamour. Pete O' Clarke's old man xould have been taken fom the pages of Marx's The German Ideology. This was the non-alienated man who would sometimes be seen fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, and engaging in literary criticism after dinner. His cousin - a factory worker in Swindon - managed to teach himself Greek and Latin by chalking up the grammar on his workplace lathe! Should History take one of its ugly backward turns - if things started getting rough - you can count on the likes of Pete O'Clarke's old man and his cousin in Swindon to put themselves into the right place at the right time and do the right thing.
It was in 1958 that Pete O'Clarke's old man decided to build a metal scaffold bar in his back yard, and kids have been doing pull-ups and acrobatic curls on it ever since. In 1959 he converted the garden shed into a weightlifting gym, and nowadays a squad of aspiring Charles Atlas types turn up to do work-outs there most evenings every week. Once a month they board
the 5A bus into town and make their way to Le Club Musculation to train with the semi-professionals - "the creme-de-la-creme of raw muscle" as Ann Brown-Sloane admiringly calls them - in an equipment packed gym in an alley near the Co-operative Store in the centre of town.
The elite gym's manager is a cousin of Pete O'Clarke's old man's Swindon cousin. (He has a butcher's shop on the edge of Kingsmead Square.) With his bull-like neck of steel and razor-edged crew-cut you can spot him a mile off. Do a two hour training session at Le Club Musculation, breathe in its pulsating ethos, and your arm, leg and chest muscles and sense of self-belief can be felt bulging out into the biosphere! No wonder Precious McKenzie - the Bristol-based weightlifter and holder of a Commonwealth Games gold medal - told the sports editor of the Bath & Wilting that Le Club Musculation "is destined to become a legend in another lifetime!" Yet the kids from the prefabs would never have stepped into Le Club Musculation without first stepping into the garden shed gym in Pete O'Clarke's back yard. This Renaissance figure showed Prefab Land youth what dedication and self-discipline can achieve. Hardly anyone remembers Pete O'Clarke's old man today, yet he lit a flame which was to shine through the rest of our days.
The prefab gym built and inspired by Pete O'Clarke's own imagination had no drawbacks at all. However we cannot deny that La Club Musculation had one drawback, one awry ingredient, which in retropspect was the defining mark of the experience of all who sweated on its benches and limped out of its illustrious portal.

'Monty' Porter was not just a big admirer of Walter Bagehot. He was an admirer of 'Ernie' Bevin as well. Bevin was the Bristol drayman and trade unionist who was Foreign Secretary in Attlee's Labour Government.
In 1947 when he was working on a farm in Winsford - the village in Somerset where Bevin had been born - 'Monty' was told of Bevin's decision to order the Exodus - a ship packed with Jewish refugees - to return to the very country which had strained every muscle to slaughter them. (It was said locally that Bevin thought his father - who he had never known - had been Jewish and he was taking the opportunity of settling an old score.)
'Monty' thought Bevin's Exodus decision was badly mistaken. However in 1951 his estimation of Bevin went up a few notches. This was after he read a newspaper article in which Bevin stated
he should "be able to buy a ticket at Victoria Station to go anywhere I damn well please!" This made quite an impact on 'Monty' who had a hunger for travel (despite having only been out of Somerset twice.)
Another phrase from Bevin played a part in one of the big life-changing events in 'Monty's life. Tit-Bits magazine had carried a full page advertisement for a "Save A Fortune Cut Your Own Hair Clipper!" After taking the bait 'Monty' discovered that the "Save A Fortune Cut Your Own Hair Clipper!" was not content with just cutting his hair. It wanted to cut pieces of skin and flesh as well! It was when 'Monty' Porter was still in a state of heavily bandaged shock he came across a quotation from Ernie Bevin which really hit home. The man from Winsford had declared that the big problem with the British Working-Class was its "poverty of aspirations." It dawned on 'Monty' that his own poverty of aspirations had been the direct cause of his own bloodied head. The days of his trying to cut his own hair were gone for ever.
A few days later 'Monty' Porter was seen storming into the Winter Palace of the new semi-skyscraper department store in Bristol city centre. Within less than an hour he had sprayed a dazzling "live now, pay later!" signature on the dotted line of a five hire-purchase (HP) agreements. Buying goods on the 'never never' became second-nature for the smartly turned out 'Monty'. Some prefab residents were soon following his well coiffured lead. Those who signed 1950s' 'HP' agreements were also signing execution warrants for the old low aspirations social order.

'Monty' Porter once bought a second-hand tweed jacket which had a copy of Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867) in one of its side pockets. 'Monty' noticed that as soon as his fellow drinkers spotted his Walter Bagehot they would start giving far more careful consideration to the weight and bulk of his arguments than had previously been the case. The book's title triggered much debate. Welshmen, Scotsmen, and Ulstermen wondered how on earth a book on the United Kingdom's constitution could be called have the English Constitution. Dapper types with Queen Anne furniture in Queen's Square apartments never saw this as a problem. Soon the once solitary 'Monty' Porter was seen as the King's Arm's pre-eminent authority on constitutional issues. He would never dream of entering a public house without having Bagehot's elegantly written text somewhere on his person. The combined impact of a top-notch tweed jacket and Bagehot's The English Constitution transformed a bloke who had grown up in Peasedown with a gammy eye into a force to be reckoned with.
In his youth 'Monty' Porter had been fascinated by Oliver Cromwell and took a republican stance in public bar debates. The royalist and aristocratic lexiography of public house names in Bath became a source of irritation. He would compalin that "after a couple of pints in the Duke of Cambridge, or the Duke of York, or the Duke of Cumberland, or the King's Head, or the King of Wessex, or the King Bladud, or the Queen Charlotte, or the Queen's Head, or the Queen Adelaidey, you did not know which crowned lord to give a salutation to!"
Constant reading of The English Constitution led 'Monty' to take a different stance. Bagehot's line about the country being "a disguised republic" was taken to heart. He now saw the aristocratic and monarchical pub signs as performing a vital stabilising role in sustaining the political order. "Without them the political system would shatter into a million shards of glass, and Thomas Hobbes' war of all against all would tear the country apart." The transformation of the Peasedown champion of republicanism into a conservative who only drank in public houses which had royalist-affiliated names became the talk of his old village.
If 'Monty' had never bought his second-hand jacket with a copy of The English Constitution in one of its side-pockets he would have just been a solitary bloke with a gammy eye reading the Daily Mirror in a corner of the saloon bar. Thanks to his Walter Bagehot he had become someone with something to say.
In the 1950s almost a quarter of public houses had royalist or aristocratic names. What kind of ideological impact this had is hard to say. As for the old man he was always on the look out for a public house called The 'Smokey' White.

After leaving blitzed and battered Bristol behind and moving to soon to be blitzed and battered Bath the old man bumped into a chap with a gammy eye called 'Monty' Porter in the Kings Arms in Princess Street. The old man mistook 'Monty' for the legendary 'Smokey' White, a long-lost buddy who he had last seen on the London Embankment on a November evening in 1938. (The old man had given up coal mining for an above surface job as a lift-operator in a Waitrose supermarket store.) "What ever happened to 'Smokey' White?" was a question that was often heard from the late 1930s on. (Some say that 'Smokey' White was a mythical figure, an emblem for a lost sense of Old Working Class fraternity.)
The drinker in the saloon bar of the King's Arms turned out to be 'Monty', not 'Smokey'. This was at one and the same time a major loss and a signifiant gain. The old man had been labouring at Fairfield House on the Newbridge Road. (From 1936 to 1940 this was the residence of the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie.) Instead of having a sandwich at the Royal Oak something had prompted the old man to retrace his steps, re-take the road he had previously not taken, and walk into the King's Arms' welcoming embrace.
On the walls of the saloon bar of the King's Arms are drawings and paintings of the King's Bath. the pub is a few minutes stroll from Queens Square and apartments filled with delightful Queen Anne furniture. (Although the recently refurbished Assembly Rooms would soon be blown to bits by German bombers, the residents of Queen Square never had any doubts that their Queen Anne furniture would survive the war unscratched.)
'Monty' Porter was a regular at the King William on the London Road who had taken a liking to the Prince of Wales which is a stone's throw away from the King's Arms. When his building site work was finished he would stroll through Queen Victoria Park and have a "quick half" in the King's Arms before heading home. When he was mistaken for the legendary 'Smokey' White by the old man he said this was quite understandable. "For someone clearly fatigued after spending eight hours labouring for the Emperor of Ethiopia it is a wonder you did not mistake me for the author of The English Constitution!"

We never ran out of grub in the prefab. There was always a bowl of Weetabix, a boiled egg and a slices of toast around. On one Sunday we had a two course feast of chicken followed by jelly laced with condensed milk! The old man says that in the north of Italy lots of families have chicken every week! Our kitchen larder was never stocked to the brim like Auntie Eileen's in Talywain. But "we always had enough" (as my mum, looking back) would sayone day. In 1950 we even recieved a parcel of tinned fruit sent by Auntie Elma, my mum's sister.
'Tubby' Lard's mum says she hates the way that us humans eat sentient beings like cows and chickens and pigs are eaten by us humans, but she keeps on serving up bacon and eggs for breakfast. (The old man cracks jokes about "having bacon and eggs tomorrow - provided we find some bacon, and provided we find some eggs.") Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one calls himself a "meat-eating vegetarian" and took exception to a piece he read by George Orwell about beetroot juice drinkers and sandal wearing vegetarians.
The old man likes to celebrate the ending of rationing in 1954 by having a feast of fried bread, dripping, liver, kidneys, onions, and pigs' trotters - all cooked in a sea of hissing fat. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit Of Grease are the corner-stones of the Physiological Constitution of the Old Working-Class.
Someone on the wireless said this kind of fat-laden diet was a memory-reflex from the 1920s and 1930s when families in the coal-mining villages of South Wales were half starving. "Half-starving!" the old man said. "We lived like Kings in those days! During the 1926 General Strike we were roating sheep on the hillsides! With a shilling in your pocket you could get a hair cut, have a fish and chip supper, watch Ray Milland at the cinema, go out for a pint, and still have some change in your pocket! Prices were falling in those days and towns were not full of tenth rate punks!"
There are no guarantees that the work with Derro Enamels is going to last, so there is an 'eat up while you can' imperative in household like ours. That is why 'Tubby' Lard is not the only tubby chap around here. Extra reserves of body weight have to be built up in order to have a cushion when the lean times come. It is the prefab equivalent of saving up for a rainy day.

Within a couple of months of being put on the Derro Company payroll the old man was informed by the authorities that - as he was now working on the Continent for more than six months a year -he had ceased to be classed as a 'domiciled' resident of the United Kingdom. He was now a 'non-dom' and not officially resident in the UK for tax-paying purposes. And that was official!
Some people are born into'non-dom'status, some people achieve 'non-dom' status, and some people have 'non-dom' status thrust upon them. The days of being a bona fide payer of UK income tax were over kaput, finito, and up the creek. He could pay as much income tax as he liked to the tax collectors of Italy (are there any?) but the UK tax collectors wanted nothing to do with him. There was no point in him pacing up and down in the back yard and calling out "to be or not to be?" The tax man had given him the definitive answer.
In the 1950s not having to pay income tax meant that a household's pockets grew by a full eight per cent deeper! (Even after paying for the self-employed national insurance stamp you were quids in.)
You might think this was good news, but au contraire! The exclusion of the old man from the ranks of the income tax paying masses was a complete pain in the neck! Our peace of mind was knocked for six. We should have chained ourselves to the railings outside the tax inspector's office and held up our Let Us Pay Income Tax Like Everyone Else! placards.
Those who do not pay income tax are not fully paid-up citizens. Only those who have been lived in the shadows of Non-Dom-Ville are able to comprehend this truth. States which push their tax extraction powers too far give their income tax paying masses the glorious right to rebel. They can write glorious stories on the picture book of history. History would have been a damp squib if everyone had been a non-dom. There would be no Magna Carta, no Declaration of Independence, no idea of the 'The Rights of Man'. The tax authorities deprived the old man of his inalienable right to be a revolting peasant.
A nagging fear lurks in the shadowy recesses of our prefab an official letter from the Inland Revenue is going to land - and land with one almighty plop - on our front door mat. It will tell us there has been a minor slip-up, an administrative error, and the old man has in fact been liable to pay income tax after all! "So send us your cheque for twelve thousand pounds, twelve shillings and twelvepence halfpenny to us pronto. And we mean pronto!"
If the State does end up chasing us up for any income tax arrears we will have a Plan B in place. There are plenty of Continental bolt-holes to head for. Stamped on each page of the old man's cement-smeared passport are scores of names of ports of entry and border control stations: Indrejst aen, Chiasso, Kon Marchaussee, Halsingborg... Any of these could be our escape destination. We will catch an early train at Bath Spa station, head for the key junction of Mangotsfield (this will give off a false scent of our heading for the Midlands, Holyhead, and Ireland), and then turn east, board the boat train at Harwich under the cover of night, and then find an income tax paying job somewhere.

Every week during the 1930s scores of unemployed Welsh coalminers would head for sleeping berths on the London Embankment. George Edwards - a miner from Pontypool who had been blacklisted by the employers for his trade union activities - decided he would have to make his way to Canada if he was to find work
A complex range of factors can lead to people ending up "on the floor" (OTF). More often than not these are structural - the booms and slumps of the capitalist economy - but psychological flaws of character can sometimes play a part as well. The case of the Duke of Bristol who gambled and drank his vast fortune away was a source of endless fascination for the horse race betters who assembled on Saturday mornings at Smith's Wine Vaults. "Some people just want to end up on the floor!" said Arthur Post. 'Monty' Trolley was one of the first Bathonians (or Bath Onions as those born in Bath prefer to be called) to develop an interest in chaos theory. In fact it was a discussion he had with a local newspaper reporter that led to the "Chaos theory confirmed!" headline in the Bath & Wilting. "A gust of wind triggered by a freak storm in the Pacific led to the £1,000 cheque Bert Swiley had just pocketed from the ("we do not do refunds") One Is Born Every Minute! bookmakers in Peterpoint Street being snatched out of his cold sweaty hand. Mr Swiley told a reporter from that it meant he "was now officially 'on the floor' (OTF)."
Thanks to the Long Boom of Consumer Capitalism a diminishing number of people were finding themselves "on the floor" from the mid-1950s on. Yet money in the prefabs was still tight. When pupils at Weymouth House Technical School were invited to go on a four-day "low budget" trip to France both 'Ossie' Oster and 'Tubby' Lard raced home to tell their parents of the exciting news. (This was after Jane Lewis had stunned everyone by telling them that "oui" in French had nothing to do with going to the lavatory). 'Ossie' and 'Tubby' were stunned a second time in two days when they discovered that - far as their families were from being 'on the floor' - there was not enough money around for them to go on the trip. The upset they saw in their mums' eyes meant they would never mention a school trip ever again.

People are always asking where the old man got his big career break and was able to acquire the
coveted skills of furnace bricklaying. This happened when he was working in the Black Country in Brierley Hill. It was from there that he landed a job with a Rotterdam-based company called Derro Enamels. Without the likes of Derro Enamels the Long Post-War Consumer Boom (which floated on oceans of refrigerators and washing-machines) would never have left port!
When the old man heads off to the Continent with his American movie-style hat, American movie-style suit, Orson Wells-style loosened tie and bulky trowel-filled travel bag, the old man cuts a distinctive worker aristocrat figure. When he returns to the prefab the place becomes choc-o-bloc with bottles of brandy and boxes of Dutch cigars. The phrase "Jack is back!" is whispered in saloon bars by canny characters who are on the look out for a free pint.
It is not too long before the Derro Enamels money-fuelled euphoria subsides and the worker aristocrat image looks a little frayed at the edges. When the old man is directing enamel furnace operations abroad he does not simply get a wage: his living expenses are paid as well! When he is waiting at home to be called for his next job he no wages at all - not a cent. Derro Enamels expect him to become a luftmensch - someone who lives on air alone - and were it not for mum's prolific budgeting skills we would soon be heading for Skintsville. In Skintsville everyone is either "on the floor", about to be "on the floor", or recovering from being "on the floor." When the Secret History of the British Working-Class is finally published its title will be "On The Floor (OTF)."
On evenings with a harvest moon when the owl in Silk-Farr's Wood is hooting eerily away unexpected events are prone to happen. On one such evening the old man returned from The Green Tree with a homeless pub pianist in tow. The pianist had uttered the "OTF" phrase, and this phrase can be guaranteed to open the old man's empathic heart. Whenever I see a harvest moon or an owl gives off an eerie hoot - especially if a chill wind is whistling outside - thoughts go back to the homeless pub pianist the old man brought home from The Green Tree. Has this sad- eyed maestro managed to find a secure sofa berth for the night or has his luck finally run out with him ending up "on the floor?"

'Tubby' Lard likes to come out with things which take all of us aback. For example the other night he pulled up on his bike and said: "Do none of you realise that the life you lead on this prefab estate is risibly claustrophobic!"
Gary Bollard of prefab number four was clearly needled by this. "Just what do you expect! There are caravan sites which are bigger and have more facilities than this place!"
"And caravan sites have lots of different people who are constantly coming and going" said Len Sullivan (prefab number thirty-three.) "There is not much coming and going around here. Almost everyone who moved into these prefabs back in the late 1940s is still here today. And what makes things worse is the fact that other people - especially those who live up in the Admiralty council houses in Camelot Green - steer well clear of us."
"That could be because they kow about the prefabs' asbestos-lined walls" suggested Adrian Denton. (The resident of prefab number thirty-six had been coughing away for a couple of weeks.) "They might not be steering clear of the estate because of us."
"Well they can steer clear of us for good" said Jane Lewis of prefab number thirteen. "That is their problem. In Gloucestershire they say 'You only miss the water when the well is dry'. Well, the well we are drinking from is not dry at all. It is full to the brim with our families and friends. 'People like 'Tubby' Lard are going to miss this 'risible claustrophobic' place like mad one day."
(Jane ignored the sniggers which followed her "Well the well").
"It is alright for you, Jane" someone passing by said. "You don't have to live next door to the Swileys!"
"But Jane is right!" said Adrian Denton. (Adrian was in a buoyant mood despite nursing the latest black eye that his old man, the grumpy bus conductor known as Hawkeye, had given him). "Just think of all the games we play and the laughs we have here."
"And just think of all the people who are laughing at us!" said 'Tubby' Lard. "What you forget is that those who do not live in prefabs like to cheer themselves up by making fun of people who do!"
"One of the hard truths about our small prefab world is that it is too inward looking" said 'Ossie' Oster from prefab number seventeen. We hardly ever come across anyone who lives in a real house and goes to a real school - the ones with tennis courts and libraries filled with books on Greek and Latin. Do we travel to Athens and Rome? Do we meet lots of smart people? No - we
fritter our summer holidays away by sitting on top of coalhouse roofs and let our brains rust away."
"It's all summed up by Mark 4: 25" said Len Sullivan. (The resident of prefab number thirty-three enjoyed showing off the fruits of learning from his Saint Michael Is No Angel Sunday School days.)

'For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.'

What the author of these words sid was to completely suss out the way social structures like ours works."
"For heaven's sake, give it a rest and wake up!" (Ann Brown-Sloane had a knack of having the final say.) "Jane Lewis sems to be the only one around here who really understands just how stupendously rich we all are. We have homes to go to, we have loads of friends!" ("Well, you do!" whispered Len). "We really belong. We live in lovely places with mod. cons. and gardens. We enjoy the kind of freedom which people laid down their lives for. What we should be doing is thanking our lucky stars and grabbing hold of the feast of life!"
Len Sulivan muttered something about grabbing hold of the feast who was sat just a few feet away from him. But the debate was over. There was even a round of applause for Ann Brown-Sloane. Her magic had worked once again.

The idea of setting up a Prefab Philosophy Club took off in a big way when we were sat on the kerbstone at the top of Woodhedge Road. The desultory penalty kicking against the black painted school gate had come to a halt, and a hunger was in the air for some intellectual work. Gazing up at the bright blue sky we saw a solitary shining cloud in the shape of the British Isles was hovering directly above us. 'Tubby' Lard hit the nail on the head when he said: "It is as if the Gods have ripped our country's page from their atlas of the world and magnified it a thousand times!" Ann Brown-Sloane recalls this moment "a numinous epiphany, a meeting of Joan of Arc and William Blake in the Twiverton heavens!" For Gary Bollard this was a moment of definitive change: "The days of life on our prefab estate being poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short are over!"
The long Summer holiday was drawing to a close and we had been kicking our heels around for too long. If there had been tennis courts and a swimming pool near-by everything would have felt different. As it was our brains had been atrophying and our physiques going flabby. We needed a new agenda, something which would galvanize us into life and stop us going to the dogs! Something which would endow our prefab estate with a slice of panache and kudos and counter the condescension of the non-prefab world. We had to raise our game and get noticed. We had to set up a philosophy club!

One of the great advantages about having rows with foreigners is that they are on the defensive from the word go. After all, what are they doing in this country anyway!
Local residents include two Welshmen (who are 'foreigners' by definition since 'Welsh' is Saxon for 'foreigner'), someone from Malta, a refugee from Germany, and a Scottish-Pakistani family who are liked by everyone (bar the Slileys of course.) In a terraced house near the dark railway arch on the Lower Bristol Road lives a lean and tough looking youngish woman who has a crew-cut hair style. She was with the Polish resistance during the war. The Slileys like nothing better than shouting "Go back to your own country!" to a foreigner with a bad leg, but they are as quiet as mice whenever they encounter the wman from the Polish resistance!
Anti-foreigner jibes are very rare on our estate - the prefabs are a repository of civic virtue - but when sulky Len Sullivan (prefab number thirty-three) fell out with "I want to be a taxi driver!" Ernie Flynn (prefab number fifteen) you could sense that something bad was in the air. Len Sullivan had been hit for six by Ernie Flynn in a cricket match on the green. He immediately took his bat home and gave his mum a somewhat doctored account of the indignities he had suffered. There was no way Len Sullivan's mum was going to let a Flynn hit her precious Len for six. Two vitally relevant items of judiciously-weighed evidence were hurled towards prefab number thirty-three. The outrageously illegitimate manner (tantamount some might say to an act of war) in which the indigenous Len Sullivan had been hit for six by the ginger-haired interloper Ernie Flynn was exposed for all to see. Item One was the fact that both Ernie's mum and dad had been born in the Irish Republic - and in Cork as well! Item Two was the historically verifiable fact that the Irish Republic had adopted a policy of neutality during the second world war. This meant that - in geo-political terms -the residents of prefab number fifteen were complicit in the Nazi war effort. And to cap it all one of the Gaelic clan had grievously wronged Len Sullivan by hitting his weakly delivered cricket ball for six without due cause.

Some people manage to acquire an uncanny knack of being able to walk into a betting shop in any town and place money on a horse which is destined to be pipped at the post into second place. Skills like these take years to cultivate.
Wads of money have been siphoned from our modest rented prefab into the splendid detached
house with a long winding gravel drive that is owned by the There Is One Born Every Minute bookmaker in Peterpoint Street. The old man takes his losses on the chin and says betting on horses is "just a bit of fun." It certainly is a bit of fun for the bookmaker in Peterpoint Street.
On Saturday mornings a small platoon of There Is One Born Every Minute gamblers assembles in the saloon bar of Smith's Wine Vaults. At hourly intervals eighty-six year old Harold - the oldest and most frail member of the group - is dispatched to Peterpoint Street with a batch of betting slips in his trembling hands. When he was away in the merchant navy Harold memorised hundreds of quotations from Immanuel Kant. This was one of his favourites:

It frequently happens that a man delivers his opinions with so much boldness and assurance that he appears to be under no apprehension as to the possibility of error. The offer of a bet startles him, and makes him pause.

There are no startled pauses in Smith's Wine Vaults.

When we heard an enormous thud against the front door late one Saturday afternoon we knew that the old man's legendary betting system had finally struck gold. Although his horse had come in second, the 'winning' horse had been subjected to a technical disqualification. The winnings had been promptly 'carpeted' and an enormous thud-making Persian carpet purchased.
The Smith's Wine Vaults' betting squad include Arthur Load (a postman), 'Monty' Trolley (a hospital porter), and Jim Smith (an 'industrial grade' civil servant.) After placing all his rent money on a rank outsider called Rent Boy Jim hit the jackpot and has been bought free drinks on the tale ever since. If you have been asked to supply the name of a referee on some official form then Jim Smith ('industrial grade' civil servant) is your man. He is employed at a top secret Ministry of Defence underground arms depot which will serve as an impregnable bunker retreat for key Government and military personnel in the event of a nuclear attack. We cannot reveal its location but a six mile long underground passage which runs in an esaterly direction from the Empire Hotel will take you there in no time.
In 1940 Jim Smith was taken to one side by the authorities and told to "watch his step." His hard-heeled shoes make a piercing rat-tat-tat sound whn he walks on a hard surface - you can hear his approach a mile off - and he had been half expecting to be told that this repeated rat-tat-tat sound was getting on the authorities' wick. So he was quite astonished to hear that the formal reprimand he was given was for remarks he had made about the German origins of the Royal Family.
Jim Smith once lived on the Blackway Estate which towers over Twiverton. On Saturday mornings he would rat-tat-tat his way down the hill and call into prefab number twenty-four for a smoke and a cup of tea. Prior to taking what Laurel and Hardy called an "egress" he would take a shiny silver coin from a trouser pocket and place it in the palm of my hand with a resounding "and the best of luck!" This sequence was as predictable as the back garden water butt filling to the brim after a heavy downpour of rain. And then - quite out of the blue - a Saturday morning came which lit no silver lights. The civil servant from the secret arms depot donned his overcoat and was half way out of the back door without even a hint of making the obligatory cash donation. (Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one calls this a "Black Swan Day" when "well established patterns and sequences turn out not to have been well established at all.") After flouting custom and precedent Mr J.Smith then had the nerve to look offended when I shouted out: "Got any money then!"
Although no shiny silver "and the best of luck!" coins ever came my way again, our contact in the civil service still allowed his name to be given as a referee/witness in any official applications. In prefab circles finding the name of someone with a half-credible claim to a coveted 'professional'
(albeit 'industrial grade') status is no easy matter. Dublin-born Jim Smith also acted as a referee/witness on political matters as well. Gamblers in Smith's Wine Vaults are kept well informed about the conduct of the British State in Ireland. "For the people back home 1649 was only yesterday" says Jim. "It is just ten generations since Oliver Cromwell's atrocities at Drogheda and Wexford were carried out." On one occasion a Protestant from Belfast wandered into Smith's Wine Vaults at the very moment when Jim Smith was in full flow. "Your friend has 'got it all wrong!" he told the assembled horse race betters. "Cromwell's actions were 'reprisals' for the events of 1641 when thousands of Anglo-Scottish Protestant settlers had been
slaughtered."
You might have thought that Jim Smith's stance on the Irish Question ("Or the British Question" as the James Joyce figure in the corner of the bar would say) might incline him to take a sympathetic stance on the plight of other peoples who have been subjected to colonial domination. The crooked timber of political emotion follows a different logic. After leaving the Blackway Estate for a flat in inner city Walcot Jim Smith started to make derogatory comments about people of colour. This did not impress the old man. "Pack in that show-off race talk!" the old man told him in the Empire Bar. "Or I will be putting my money on the Norfolk-reared horse called Oliver Cromwell!"

No prefab on our estate has an aura quite like the aura of prefab number forty-eight. This is because one of the residents of prefab number forty-eight is Miss Ann Brown-Sloane.
When a member of our religious studies class stumbled across the Biblical line about not "coveting your neighbour's donkey" 'Tubby' Lard motioned towards the unknowing Ann and said: "But sir, the passage in my copy of Exodus does not say donkey." This was unforgiveable.
While Ann Brown-Sloane resides in a six hundred square foot low status abode like the rest of us, hers is bathed in sultry, sweltering, glitzy, pulse-racing, Californian-style glamour.
When Phil (now nicknamed 'Dark Horse') Perkins was seen silhouetted in Ann's bedroom window tongues were bound to wag. Phil had once been a mainstay of the Saint Michael Is No Angel Sunday School before undergoing a crisis of faith. "The core doctrines are not literal truths" he told Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one. They have to be seen as metaphors. For example the idea of the the Virgin Birth is a metaphor to hide embarrassment over sex, and the Resurrection is a metaphor which masks our fear of death."
It was The Shock which brought Phil's crisis of faith to an ultimate point of crisis. An ever-dutiful son, Phil decied to spring clean his prefab when his parents gone to look around the new John Lewis store in Bristol city centre. With his own bedroom drawer neatly tidied he decided to tidy up his parents' drawers as well. This was how he came across a mysterious package that was wrapped up in musty yellowing pages of the Bath & Wilting evening paper. (How many dark and grissly secrets are wrapped up in musty yellowing pages of the Bath & Wilting!) Phil - who would soon be 'Dark Horse' - took a fleeting peek at its contents.
Twenty minutes later Phil was to be seen sobbing on the kerbstone in Woodhedge Road. This popular kerbstone stands just a few feet from the edge of Ann Brown-Sloane's bushy back garden. One of the silver-hubbed wheels of the frenetically driven Co-operative Mobile Shop Van ("share number 24419!") glanced one of his out-stretched legs. Hearing the screech of the ever-frenetically driven Co-op van Ann raced out of prefab and took the distraught Phil under her ever-fragrant wing. She sat him down in her sitting-room and helped him regain his composure by tuning her wireless to the Light Programme and listening to a repeat of Hancock's Half Hour.
"Who would have thought my own parents would ever have carried on like that!" said Phil as his tear-drenched face tumbled into the lap of Ann's warm embrace. (He would later recall falling into her lap "like a leaf from a tree" - his favourite line from W.B.Yeats.)
"Crikey!" said Ann - and "Crikey!" again - as the true gravity of what Phil had found in the carefully wrapped package in his parents' bottom drawer began to sink in.

"Stone me, what a life!" (Tony Hancock).

The Shock that had exploded "like a grenade in a greenhouse." (This was how Ann put it when she spoke to her friend Jane Lewis at prefab number thirteen a few hours later.) Jane told Ann it could have been worse. "Just think of The Shock of John Ruskin after he discovered that the angelic love of his life had pubic hairs." "Or the shock of romantic poets like Keats and Shelley when they discovered that their enchanted girl friend goddeses went to the lavatory to do a number two." Phil would remember the severe reprimand he had given to Roland Bollard in thekitchen of prefab number four. "Every kid on this estate", said Roland, "can be seen as a symbolic representation of a thousand encounters of the carnal kind." Now the stark visceral truth of Roland's words had been driven home by the discovery of a packet of contraceptives carefully concealed inside a Bath & Wilting inside a bottom drawer.
Nowadays hardly a day goes by without Phil ('Dark Horse') Perkins either popping into Ann Brown-Sloane's prefab for a few moments of fragrant solace or chatting to her on the kerbstone outside her sweetly scented garden. When Ann is nowhere to be seen he idles away the hours by staring into a small plastic gadget which reveals, with each unedifying click of its button, a new photograph of women's breasts. Such were the depths to which an unknown number of young residents of 1950s prefab estates had been known to sink.

The Swileys' prefab would be plastered with 'Vote Labour!' posters during election campaigns. In 1959 the Swileys even had a 'Vote Labour!' posters glued on their coalhouse door. For anyone who was even vaguely sympathetic to Labour this was bad news. The impact made by the posters on the Swileys' prefab was comparable to that of the Zinoviev Letter of 1924 which led to the fall of the first Labour Government.
Four general elections were held during our prefab years and the Conservative Party won three of them - the last three on the trot. "Which is one in the eye for the Trots!" said Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic with a mischievous wink. (His mischievous winks were completely wasted as Leon Trotsky was hardly a household word on the prefab estate.)
Twiverton forms part of the proletarian heartland of a Tory constituency and is solid Labour territory. However it seems unlikely that Twiverton will remain solidly Labour for very much longer. The rash of Swileys' 'Vote Labour!' posters acted as political acid in dissolving Labourist loyalties. The Conservative Party HQ on the London Road quickly cottoned on to the fact that the Swileys were a secret weapon, and if fewer than two posters were seen on display in prefab number twenty-five a batch of new super-sized ones were speedily delivered. Voters wearing red rosettes en route to cast a vote at the polling station would break down and sob if they caught sight of the forest of Swileys' 'Vote Labour!' posters. Other candidates sensed the chance to make a decisive breakthrough. (In the late 1950s and early 1960s these were Edgar Dickens - Bath Dickens Society stalwart and Liberal Party candidate, Edna Browning - recently knighted expert on trade union affairs from Tottenham and Conservative Party candidate, and Gilbert Youth of the World Government Party who - win or lose - would continue to hold his mild and bitter constituency surgeries in a number of local watering holes).
On each of the nine days of the 1926 General Strike copies of the Worker's Voice rolled off secret printing presses in railway arches on the Lower Bristol Road. One of its editorials
described Twiverton as "the linchpin of the 'proletarian red belt' of north-east Somerset, a hard-edged/soft water terrain inhabited by stone masons, cabinet makers, shop workers, solicitors' clerks, and domestic workers. Ghosts from its Chartist, Luddite, Leveller and Muggletonian past pace up and down its terraced streets." It is hard to see such Left political romanticism returning to Twiverton today (although history always likes to surprise.) The Conservative Party election victories of 1955 and 1959 signalled the emergence of what Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic in prefab number one likes to call "the effluent society." The concerns of the labourer in the prefab were pushed off the agenda of the political class, and those with terrapins in back gardens came into their own.

It is hard to pin down the precise date when a group of us decided to "have a go!" at setting up a Prefab Philosophy Club. (The "have a go!" phrase was inspired by Wilfred Pickles, the folksy Yorkshireman who hosted the "Have a go, Joe!" BBC radio quiz broadcast which ran from 1946 to 1967).
One of the first projects of the Prefab Philosophy Club was to take a leaf out of Walter Benjamin's book and encourage residents to make "maps of their own lives." Benjamin's idea of "aura" had impressed us all. This was only to be expected since prefabs are saturated with a very distinctive aura or atmosphere of their own - and the idea of mapping out our own lives was made us appreciate this all the more. Here is Benjamin's own effort (he lived from 1892 - 1940) at sketching out his own 'life-map' in pre-First World War Berlin.

"I have evolved a system of signs, and on the grey background of such maps they would make a colourful show if I clearly marked in the houses of my friends and girl friends, the assembly halls of various collectives, from the 'debating chambers' of the Youth Movement to the gathering places of the Communist youth, the hotel and brothel rooms that I knew for one night, the decisive benches of the Tiergarten, the ways to different schools and the graves that I saw filled, the sites of prestigious cafes whose long-forgotten names daily crossed our lips, the tennis courts where empty apartment blocks stand today, and the halls emblazoned with gold and stucco that the terrors of dancing classes made almost the equal of gymnasiums."

This was the life-map conjured up by one of the members of the Prefab Philosophy Club (her nom de plume was Spinzoza Dice). What Walter Benjamin had done for pre-war 'Berlin'we would do for post-Second World War Twiverton!

"We have evolved a system of signs, and on the green background of such maps (laid out on the baize of subbuteo table football pitches) they make a colourful show. We have clearly marked in the prefabs of our friends and girl friends and our key gathering places. These include the 'jug and bottle' entrance to the 'My Full Moon' public house, the fish and chip shop run by Mr and Mrs Tobins, the open bedroom window of prefab number thirteen through which - on one quite unforgetable occasion - a young lady dressed only in her swimming costume gave us a friendly wave, the kerbstone on the corner of Woodhedge Road where we sat and pondered our futures, the bendy tree in the 'wooly bed' in Pennyquick Wood, the not-over-prestigious cafe hut in the football ground, the playing field that stands on top of the old coalmine, the secret pathway to the Gothic turrets of Brunel's railway tunnel, and the green emblazoned with daisies and buttercups on which the dazzling prowess of our sporting skills would be displayed to an awestruck world.

For all of 'Tubby' Lard's faults, it has to be said that he was the inspiration behind the setting up of the Prefab Philosophy Club. He started everything off by asking: "So why should supporting a football clun called Bristol Rovers have a claim to moral superiority over supporting a football club called Bristol City?"
When news of our Prefab Philosophy Club first got out the number of people who were asking the council to re-house them further away from the declined, while the number asking to move into the prefabs increased! The chap who works for the Admiralty who keeps a terrapin - a freshwater turtle - in his back garden in Camelot Green was seen doubling up with laughter when he was told that a seminar on Immanuel Kant was being held in Woodhedge Road. It was only after Nina Chapmain told him it was a "categorical imperative" that he attend the next one (Nina must have been one of the first Twivertonians to get to Cambridge) that the terrapin-like smirk vanished from his "So the prefabs Kant get enough of Kant!" face.
Some members of the Philosophy Club take part in the wireless football results rota on Saturday afternoons. There is always a short quiz before the results are broadcast at five o'clock. 'Tubby' Lard always finds a killer question to floor everyone. "Which language was spoken in seventh century Edinburgh?" was an especially memorable one. (It was Welsh - the Welsh-speaking Goddodin tribe was living in Edinburgh at this time.)
The football results would be listened to in almost complete silence - at least until the ones from the Scottish Football League came on. This all changed in 1958 when a Scottish international called Charlie 'Cannonball' Fleming was signed by Bath City. The one time East Fife and Sunderland player scored fifty goals in one season! Soon the Prefab Philosophy Club was planning a conference on Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson. 'Tubby' Lard (who used to shout out "Who on earth are Stenhousemuir!" as soon as the Scottish results came on) became a fervent follower of the club held the Scottish Qualifying Cup trophy aloft in 1902. When 'Cannonball' was in Bath we would all be on tenterhooks as we waited to hear the result of Partick Thistle brushing against the Heart of Midlothian and prepared our research papers on the impact of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment.

Jokes told in public houses in the 1950s would often start with the words: "There was an Englishman, a Welshman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman." Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud's book on the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (page 161 of the 1938 Pelican edition) explains what is going on by pointing to the following quotation:

Goethe said of Lichtenberg:
"Where he cracks a joke, there lies a concealed problem."

Underlying all the "There was an Englishman, a Welshman, an Irishman and a Scotsman" jokes was a frantic bid at relieving the tensions that are part and parcel of living under a multi-national state. It was only thanks to the mutal tolerance of Englishmen, Welshmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen that the United Kingdom had survived at all.
Scotsmen were strangely absent from the old man's drinking circles, and this could have been partly because of the tyranny of distance. Scotland seemed a heck of a long way from Somerset. Getting from South Wales to Somerset only took a couple of hours. Even Dublin was just an overnight ferry trip and a train ride away. There was a feeling that Glasgow was a place just to the south of Iceland.
Although the "There was an Englishman, a Welshman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman" jokes always seemed to be well received, the laughter which followed them always felt a shade contrived. As could also be the case with some of the passages of Professor Dr. Sigmund's Freud's famous book, it could be impossible to make heads or tales of what they really meant.

My father attended the same elementary school in Pentwyn as Roy Jenkins, the prominent Labour Party politician. These two led parallel lives. Both spent some time in 'Oxford'. Roy's 'Oxford' included the university's Bodleian Library, my father's 'Oxford' included the Cowley car factory on the other side of town.
The old man's father made the timber supports which prevented the roofs of the coal mine he worked in from caving in. If his workmanship had not been up to scratch Roy Jenkins' father might have come to grief and the future Home Secretary would never have been born. Miners would lift up their hands from deep inside the bowels of theearth and imagine they could touch flowers on the hillside above.
When he was young Roy Jenkins' father went off to Paris in search of a life of freedom. But his money ran out and he was compelled to return to work dow the mines. He became a union official (and was briefly jailed during the 1926 General Strike), was elected to Parliament. His family was able to employ a maid, and Roy Jenkins junior was sent to school wearing a silk suit. (A big mistake as he had mud thrown at him by the other boys.)
On Sundays the Jenkins family would drive out to a quiet market town for lunch in a smart hotel. Roy began to acquire a liking for claret and a taste for the more sensual side of bourgeois life.
For the old man (but never for Roy Jenkins) public houses were part of the weft and warp of daily life. Pubs functioned as seminar rooms, job centres, accommodation bureaus, and porticos into the abbyss. .
In 1950s Bath I would be sat down on the stairs of a Twiverton inn and wait to have supplies of ginger beer, Cheddar Cheese Straws - and even a pickled egg! - ferried up to my regal throne.

"The ae house is the key to every town" - Walter Benjamin.

'Tubby' Lard (resident of prefab number seven) has been known to wobble in his loyalties. Two years ago he was an unshakeable supporter of Bristol Rovers - "the aesthetics of their blue and white quartered shirts are so captivating!" Then he switched to Bristol City after they had beaten Rovers in the local derby match -"City's Ashton Gate ground does not have any of the horrible gasworks' smells that you always get at Eastville." Then - in the twinkle of any eye - he was seen walking aound showing off his new Bristol Rovers' scarf after the club's sensational
4 - 0 victory over Manchester United in the FA Cup! ("The way the Rovers' supporters sang 'Irene, Goodnight Irene' was so moving!") When challenged to justify this disgraceful turn-coat conduct 'Tubby' had the gall to quote the retort made by Winston Churchill in 1900. Having deserted the Conservative Party for the Liberal Party Churchill then re-joined the Conservative Party. "To rat is one thing" he said,"but to re-rat is something special."
Tony Taverner (known as 'Skirton' to his friends) is the footballing hero of Twiverton. He started off playing in the Somerset Youth League with Whiteway Canaries. After being spotted by a Hereford United he finally hit the big time with Manchester City and Arsenal. Every football album of any quality has a photograph of the ball slipping through the fingers pf the Arsenal goalkeeper in the 1927 F.A. Cup Final. (Cardiff City won the match by a goal to nil.)
No local player has been signed by Gateshead, a club which plays in the Third Division (North). Perhaps it is because prefabs foster a 'support the underdog' complex which explains why a number of us follow the fortunes of this supremely unfashionable club. It was 'Auntie' Ivy's brother, 'Uncle' Stan (who always gives us a wave when he is cutting the grass at the junior school) who first told us about Gateshead F.C. He married a girl from Jarrow, a town which is just up the road from Gateshead. Whenever we saw her she always looked very pale and thin. She had left her home town when it was hit by the depression in the 1930s. Her two children were quite young when she died, and whenever the Gateshead result comes on the wireless we find ourselves thinking of her.

Despite winning nearly a quarter of a million fewer votes than the Labour Party, the Conservative Party triumphed in the general election of 1951. Harold Macmillan was the new Minister of Housing. His aim was to build a record number of houses - and build them he did! In 1954 no less than three hundred and fifty-four thousand new homes went up! Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one got hold a copy of Macmillan's The Middle Way (written in 1938) and recommended it to the old man. The hard-faced Conservatism of the 1930s had taken a back seat.
Go back in your time machine from anty time between the late 1950s and the early 1960s and you would have seen Major Lansdowne - a sad-eyed figure with a droopy Harold Macmillan-style moustache - selling copies of the "Daily Worker!" The Major also believed in The Middle Way - although his was half way between Lenin and Keir Hardie. On Saturday mornings he would snip open his bundle of Daily Workers and get ready for the rush to buy. The amazing thing about Major Lansdown's selling technique was that by the end of the afternoon only one or two copies of the Daily Worker would be left, and yet no one was ever seen buying one. Supporters of the Fourth International sometimes shouted "It's Comrade Rigor Mortis!" and Cyril Connolly once stood in front of him and recited his poem about "classes and masses and masses of asses!" One letter writer to the Bath & Wilting said he disagreed with everything Major Lansdowne stood for but applauded his "indefatigable spirit." He also pointed out that it was a tactical error to stand outside the very building where - until 1954 - the masses had queued with their ration books. "The hidden semiotic message of selling Daily Workers on this spot is that socialism = rationing, which is spot on!"
Most of the shoppers ignored Major Lansdowne completely, but now and again a fierce discussion would break out. Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic said the paper had made a serious mistake by claiming that religion had been described by Marx as "the opium of the masses." "This is a mistranslation. Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses. It dulls the pain of life under capitalism which is what shopping and television does today." In 1963 a group of youthful sellers of the agit-prop newsletter Neither Moscow or Washington but Twiverton! tried to muscle in on the Major's Daily Worker patch, but he would have none of it and with some friendly police assistance ended up winning the day.
After peaking at 102,780 votes in 1945 support for the British Communist Party melted away. The revival in the party's vote in the early sixties - it edged back to 62,112 in 1966 - proved to be a false Morning Star. The spirit of the age was not just turning against Major Lansdowne's party. It was turning against prefabs as well. Prefab estates became niche constructions for the discerning few. Most people wanted to live in Middle Way. Everyone has a car and a patio in Middle Way. No one looks scruffy in Middle Way. You never see anyone like Major Lansdowne in Middle Way!

"Putting on the agony. Putting on the style. That is what the young folk are doing all the while." The lyrics of Lonnie Donnegan's hit-song of 1957 might even have been composed in a prefab. Prefab dwellers always knew they had lots of things going for them - gardens, functionality, mod-cons, a relaxed mode of being... But as the years went by they began to feel they were being put on the back foot when it came to style. Style is intrinsically elusive and hard to pin down. During our kerbstone debates some felt it was "a vivid design that no one has thought of before." (This was the view of Ann Brown-Sloane in prefab number forty-eight.) Others (notably Len Sullivan of prefab number thirty-three) believed it was "a novel way of expressing the spirit of the age." Late in the evening 'Tubby' Lard stormed off after coming out with the stinging rebuke that we had become all form and no content and that all the talk about style was "sadly symptomatic of the growing narcissism of our time."
Even 'Tubby' agreed that the new light green 5A buses -the ones which ferried Twivertonians
back and forth into town - had plenty of style. Their style oozed from every oily crevice. The buses' engines hummed with the smooth authority of Daimler cars. Just as people who have problems end up spending their free-time with other people who have problems, so stylish icons of culture end up being drawn to other stylish icons of culture. No stylish Nymph Venuses in blue jeans had ever been seen at the local bus stop waiting for the old 5A bus, but as soon as the first new 5A bus was die to arrive whole squads of them materialised from nowhere. "We just had to give the new bus's soft-padded squelching seats a sensual try!" one of them was heard to say.
The excitement generated by the new buses and blue jeans knocked 'Tubby' Lard off balance. He was determined to show the Nymph Venuses that when it came to operating the 5A bus's magical finger-touch bells he was the quickest in the west. Those accompanying 'tubby' pn his first trip on the new bus had an ominous feeling that he would prematurely eject his finger in a most unstylish way - and prematurely eject he did. The new streamlined light green 5 A bus was brought to a shuddering brake-screeching halt only having just pulled away from the previous bus stop. Jumping the gun was one thing, but this gun was still fast asleep. The brakes were applied with such vigour that one of the Nymph Venuses almost fell out of her soft-padded sensual seat. "I didn't want (cough) to get off the bus (cough) quite yet! (cough)" 'Tubby' whispered to the ferocious looking driver (who seemed poised to prematurely eject 'Tubby' Lard' from his first ride on the stylish new bus.) 'Tubby' sensed that his heinous finger-touching folly was going to be the talk of the bus passengers for the rest of the ride into town. When it
reached the final stop by the Abbey next to the 'Water is best' fountain the harsh leson had been learnt that the arrival of a stylish bus does not mean that a stylish bus driver has arrived as well. Opposites do attract sometimes.
By 1959 more and more prefabs were acquiring a lacklustre look. Their once sharply defined edges had been blunted, water butts were sprouting minor leaks, and the corrugated coalhouses no longer had lost their celebrated honey-hued look. Lawns and hedges were covered with a dew of restlessness, and strangers in grey raincoats were seen taking black-bound notepads from their pockets and jotting down estimates of the prefabs' scrap value.

Rationing ended in 1954 and the Consumer Society arrived a couple of years later. It arrived when a vending machine was installed in the village. This vending machine did not dispense mouldy old bars of chocolate or packets of Woodbine cigarettes. It dispensed ultra-fresh cartons of strawberry flavoured milk! Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number could not wait to put a coin in it. (He had mistaken it for the vending machines that were to be installed in the streets of Moscow which delivered bottles of vodka wrapped in brown paper bags!)
There was more to the Consumer Society than cartons of strawberry flavoured milk. Hard on the heels of vending machines came bars of white chocolate! (The Swiss had been tucking into this delicacy since the 1930s!) After shoving his way to the front of white chocolate queue 'Bully Boy' Brown of Shores Way was seen puking up in the gutter. ('Bully Boy' Brown's life was to show that sometimes there is a relationship between character and fate.) The pace of change taking place from 1956 on was given another accelerated boost when Bath City football club signed a player from the Continent who had a sun tan, a stylish haircut, and did overhead kicks!
A slick, press-buttoned, Meteor Jet-filled sky of a future was juggernauting and sonic booming its way towards us. It was filled bumper to bumper with a hunger for things, for Formica table tops, three-piece suites, Hoovers, hula-hoops, jukeboxes, electric irons, washing machines, Italian-style suits and winkelpicker shoes. The quiet repose that was prefab estate life would soon be over.

Press the reverse button of your time travel machine (they must have been invented by now!), go back to the year 1953, and you will see that the window ledges on the front of our prefab have been draped with three Union Jack flags. The most any other prefab on the estate could muster was two!
Mantelpieces are chock-a-block with Coronation memorabilia. Not just commemorative Coronation spoons, commemorative Coronation knives and commemorative Coronation trays -but commemorative Coronation mugs as well. "Mugs with mugs!" was the catchphrase of members of the Oliver Cromwell Society who met up at the Hat and Feather on the London Road. In the 1930s theatrical types and claimants to the throne always headed for this public house. (The hat and feathers had once been the insignia of the Cavaliers.)
By the end of June 1953 there was hardly a five year old in the country who could not spell 'Coronation' and draw a coronet as well. Canny captains of industry re-branded their mints, sofas, lollies, and evaporated milk as Coronation mints, Coronation sofas, Coronation lollies, and Coronation evaporated milk. Barbers would say "Any Coronation items for the week-end, sir?"
A month earlier, in May 1953, we crowded into 'Tubby' Lard's sitting-room to watch the television broadcast of Blackpool's 4-3 Cup Final win over Bolton Wanderers. Stanley Mortensen (whose career was to reach an even greater climax when he joined Bath City) scored a hat-trick.
Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest (someone claimed they carried a Bath Bun in their knapsack) and in 1956 an ex-Bath schoolboy - Roger Bannister - ran the mile in under four minutes.
We can now see that the period from May 1953 to May 1954 was the zenith of classical prefab civilization. Historians call it 'Prefabnia Extraordinus'. Yet no commemorative memorabilia were ever made for prefabs. Not a single plate or spoon - let alone a mug - was ever made to commemorate them. No captain of industry ever had the iconic symbol of a prefab printed on one of his products. No barber ever tactfully asked a customer if they needed "any Prefabs for the week-end?" Even in their Indian Summer of the early 1950s prefabs' exuded an absent presence.

Our prefab has five rooms, or six if you include the hall. Most other houses seem to have more, so it is no wonder that prefab dwellers have long been fascinated by the Biblical line "My Father's House has many rooms." ('Tubby' Lard's unorthodox reading of the text is that the Almighty works in the hotel industry.)
The front of Bath Abbey is dominated by two sculptures of Jacob's Ladder. The angels are shown flapping their wings in an upward ascent towards the heavenly heights. Look more carefully and you will notice that a couple of angels have lost their footing and are tumbling down the hierarchy of virtue. This is what happens if you go astray.
Hierarchies are everywhere, and that includes prefab estates. Take no notice of those who say prefab residents are all roughly (and they mean roughly) of the same status. The slick salesman who lives in the immaculate corner prefab says "au contraire!" This is someone who is never seen wearing the standard prefab string vest or drinking out of the standard prefab bottle of pale ale. His evenings are spent listening to Bach and mulling over the ideological differences between Jacobins and Jacobites. It was no wonder he was offended by the photo-journalist from the 'style section' of the New Yorker who published a picture of him in his sitting-room armchair under the headline "A British trailer-trash interior."
Working out just where our own prefab stands on the estate's Jacob's Ladder hierarchy is a tricky exercise. The old man only has one string vest, and has never had much of a liking for bottles of pale ale. When there has been plenty of work with Derro Enamels life in prefab number twenty-four looks "rather good" (a favourite phrase.) If there is a long work-less spell at home life gets less predictable. When the old man returned home after an exacting debate on the impact of inflation on living standards in the Golden Fleece he collided with the front gate (it has never been the same since) and our Capability Brown-style light green speckled hedge started looking a shade forlorn. Passing by Bath Abbey a week later I noticed that one of the falling angels had slipped down another rung.

The catchy slogan of Twiverton Baptist Church in the 1950s was "Fight truth decay!" Potential true believers were enticed through its portal by blandishments of coloured drawing paper, crayons, rubbers, and - this was perhaps the clincher - aromatic bottles of glue.
"They have gone to the other one!" a miffed recruiter from Saint Michael Is No Angel was told at prefab number twenty-four when an entire squad - yes, an entire squad! - defected to the Methodists after news got out that chocolate cakes and lemonade were to be included in its Sunday School largesse. Never before in the history of Christain theology had so many treats been bestowed in return for listening to such slender morsels of divinely revealed doctrine.
Friedrich Engels noted that people are to be judged "by what they do and not by what they say." (Which makes judgements about Engels himself - who was at one and the same time a
revolutionary communist and a Manchester textiles capitalist - a shade tricky.) The cigarette cards and cakes handed out by Twiverton's competing Sunday Schools had a very ephemeral impact. What really impressed the local population was the fact that not a single Twiverton Sunday School teacher's name ever appeared on the list of criminal convictions published by the Bath & Wilting. ("Married Sunday School teachers were a different kettle of fish" Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic would say in a witty aside.)
Towards the end of the 1950s religious observance in Twiverton went into decline and its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" was heard as clearly here as it had been on Dover Beach. Although in its formative years some New Testament texts had been wilfully given a sinister
anti-Jewish edge (thereby implicating Christianity in all kinds of atrocities culminating in those of the twentieth century) the narrative of the slaves' heroic struggle for human dignity against the merciless power of Rome remained a great source of ethical inspiration to Twivertonians.