It was in the summer of 1955 that the dynamic Londoner arrived on the prefab estate. Within days of his moving in he had bulldozed his entire back garden away to make space for a garage. He didn't yet have a car, but everyone said "what a garage!" No one had ever had a grage on the prefab estate before. The Londoner would fire off surly, agitated glances at any yokels who crossed his path. Given half the chance he would have bulldozed half of Twiverton away .
The dynamic Londoner took an instant dislike to Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one. Dai was the yang to the dynamic Londoner's ying. If Dai had had a garage he would have filled it with his books and cuttings from newspapers. All the years of wild scribbling and submitting manuscripts to editors and publishers had got Dai nowhere, and it was just as well he had not given up his day job as a security guard at Isaac Pitman's printing press on the Lower Bristol Road. Dai seemed set to become one of Thomas Grey's "mute inglorious Miltons" who lie buried and forgotten in country churchyards. People said he was like Bath City's full-back Tony Book who languished for years in non-league football in the Southern League.
Yet just as Tony Book was rescued when Malcolm Allison was appointed manager of Bath City,
so Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic was rescued - at least partially - by the enigmatic Miss Silk-Farr who lived in the exquisite Italian villa. Her launching in 1958 of the Twiverton Literary Supplement (or the TLS as it is more widely known) lifted Dai (whose pen name was the "Welsh Hegelian") out of prefab obscurity. Ever since then he has been gathering up small chippings from the statue of fame. "What AJP Taylor did for Dylan Thomas, and Lord Beaverbrook did for Michael Foot, so Miss Silk-Farr will do for Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic!" This is what they started saying in the My Full Moon - and how wrong they were (at least so far.) But if Dai's collected essays are ever published he could still have the last word.
People are always asking how Dai Lectic came to acquire his 'Tolstoy' middle name. This was a result of the very first column he wrote for the TLS back in May 1958. It was a rambling discussion of the politics of inequality. Dai began by quoting Emile Durkheim on the idea of socialism being less a theory than "a cry of pain." This was followed by a structuralist analysis of 'accidents': "can it be accidental that most 'accidents' strike those who occupy the lower foothills of the social structure?" But it was Dai's final paragraph on Leo Tolstoy's aside about misery and happiness which struck a chord with the readers and led to him acquiring 'Tolstoy' as a new middle name. Happiness seems to possess the same radiant quality in all times and places, but misery comes in different shapes and forms.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910): "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic: (1917 - ): "And all happy prefabs resemble each other, and each unhappy prefab is unhappy in its own way." (From the TLS, May 1958.)