Everyone know that Prefab Demolition Day will be highly charged. No, residents on the estate will not have to pay money to watch their prefabs being bulldozed into the ground and smashed into pulp. Prefab Demolition Day is going to be highly charged in the currency of raw tension, see-sawing emotion, and heart-wrenching bathos.
Knocking the estate down will be the biggest event to take place here since - well, since it first went up. There are rumours that a coachload of German and Italian prisoners-of-war who helped put the prefabs up will be coming over. When we watch the steel frames, plaster-board lining, and asbestos cladding being pummelled into dust there will hardly be a single wrinkled cheek which will stay dry. (And some people will cry as well.)
In some parts of the country prefab residents organized hunger strikes in a valiant bid to prevent their homes being torn down. Thre is no way this will happen here. Just a few hundred yards up the road are the de luxe homes - real council houses - that prefab residents will be moving into. "I feel like one of those consultants who Aneurin Bevan bought off when he set up the National Health Service" said Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one. "My mouth has been stuffed with gold!" No one should have any illusions about banner-waving delegations being about to march off to the Guildhall to plead for a last minute reprieve. If a 'Prefab Demolition Day Is Off!' headline was to be splashed across the front page of the Bath & Wilting the sound of teeth being gnashed and cloth being torn would be quite terrifying.
There are still a few nostalgicians around who will shed a tear when they shut their prefab doors for the last time. But history has moved into a different gear. Chrome-lined milkbars, bumper-sized jukeboxes, Formica table tops, and Italian winkle-pickers are setting a different tone. Most prefab dwellers want to grasp hold of the shiny keys of non-prefabricated citizenship - and grasp hold of them now!