Only a select few have ever had the privilege of seeing the inside of a prefab. Countless numbers regularly troop around palaces and stately homes and country houses, but the viewing of prefab interiors is (like the private quarters of 10 Downing Street) strictly by personal invitation only.
Visitors to our 1950s' prefab would be escorted into the sitting-room. (Socially aspiring types called it the living-room.) You would have seen an African wood carving from Southern Rhodesia; a wooden stool which looked as if it had been taken from van Gogh's room in Arles; an elegant lampstand "Weimar style" according to Pete O'Clarke's old man); an Escalado horse race set (the same horse never won twice in a row); a robot with plasticine eyes made out of Meccano); a jug the old had been given given by the owner of the Albergo Ristorante 'Continental' Bassano Grappo (he said it had been the best place he had ever stayed in); a plastic Airfix model of a lethal Japanese Zero fighter plane; a gyroscope which kept on spinning; a silver bell from a souvenir shop in Brussels; and a music box with a haunting melody which reminded everyone of Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949) film. This aesthetic configuration would have even impressed Erno Goldfinger, the Hungarian architect who was a leading authority on prefab design and was so cruelly maligned in Ian Fleming's James Bond novel.
Even now I feel guilty about the football pitch markings that were scratched on to the once-smooth surface of the sitting-room table. Chiselling away at the secrets of Prefab Land (circa. 1957) has plenty of drawbacks, but it is a big advance on chiselling away at the surface of our
only polished table. The landlord of the Martello Tower Bar says it was a yearning to chisel away at the secrets of Dublin (circa. 1904) that made James Joyce go into exile in Trieste and Paris. He made sure he put a copy of the Dublin street guide into his travel bag. At this very moment someone driven by the same compulsion could be placing a copy of Kelly's Guide to Bath into their travel bag. Without a street map and a spell of exile it is impossible to make sense of the life you have left behind.