It is not accurate to claim - as many do - that "all prefabs look the same." Take the ones on our own estate. (This is a cue for 'no one else will!') Although every prefab has been made to the same standard specifications, each one cultivates its own very distinctive persona. Some prefabs remain in a smooth, pristine blotch-less condition for years on end and manage to retain the fresh-faced vitality of their earliest days. Thee have gilded paths which are gently caressed by the sweet scent of roses. Others begin to give off a pungent body odour within days of their being constructed and quickly become pockmarked with all kinds of odd and oily looking substances. Stains of a most suspicious kind are streaked across their rusting lower firmaments, and stray hounds on the look out for hospitable terrains feel compelled to anoint them at regular intervals.
One of the prefabs which has had more stray hound dog visits than most is prefab number twenty-five. Its first residents enjoyed climbing in through their next door neighbour's kitchen window and hurling plates and cutlery into the back garden. There was sweet relief all round when they moved to Bristol when the eldest son was signed up as a goalkeeper by the Black Arabs football club. The sweet relief was not to last for long. It dissipated the moment the new residents were seen moving in. The new residents were the Swileys!
Reviewers in the Sunday supplements and the literary press have to date not said a single harsh word about The Prefab Files. (This is not too surprising given that they are oblivious to its existence.) However it is not hard to imagine what their criticisms would be. "The Prefab Files are saturated with archaic nostalgia and soft-lensed romanticism. They have the gall to ooze a paste of pseudo-magical realism on to the dull, tedious repressed life of a 1950s' prefab estate in a parochial Somerset outpost and portray it as some kind of lost Golden Age!" This might well be true if we had said nothing in The Files about the Swileys. Yet evade the Swileys we have not. We have confronted their presence head-on. And we have recognised that ours was not the only prefab estate in the country which had its Swileys!