The more refined and genteel prefabs on our estate tended to be furthest away from the ever merry My Full Moon public house and closest to the iron fence which bordered the grounds of Twiverton's finest - and Twiverton's only - Italian Villa. In the Victorian era Silk-Farr House (as Silk-Farr House was otherwise known) was a citadel of power-broking, political intrigue and financial wheeler-dealing. (Cinema goers should be under no illusions that the forthcoming Hollywood blockbuster The Mysterious Lady Who Lived In The Italian Villa strays a considerable way from the historical truth.) In the 1880s anyone unfortunate enough to make a faux-pas at one of the Italian Villa's famous masked balls would have their dreams of high office crash down in ruins. (As the descendants of the notorious Sir Roger Sliley (Bart.) know all too well.)
In its twilight early 1960s' days the ever enigmatic Miss Silk-Farr kept up the family's tradition of public-spirited philanthrophic endeavour by making an annual visit to the local junior school (built in 1952 on land her family had donated to the community) in order to present books and gold leafed certificates and inspire bright-eyed pupils with a hunger for glittering prizes.
During the 1914-18 war the mills owned by the Silk-Farr produced fabrics for British Army uniforms. With the end of part two of the horrendous European Wars in 1945 the Silk-Farrs used their famous west wing to house an archive of historical research. (However plans to have the words "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" engraved on its ceiling had to be abandoned following a crisis in funding.) Anderson Perry - a patrician Ulster aristocrat who is still rembered for his editorship of the Soho-based journal Theory Is Good For You spent a six month sabbatical beavering away in the archives of Silk-Farr House. His pathbreaking analysis of Labourist submission to the hegemony of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie - and of how these two social formations fused together to form a new power bloc in 19th century Britain - could even have been formulated here. (Painstaking empirical research by the renowned Bath historian R.S. Neale - who left Bath Technical College in 1964 to take up a chair in economic history at the University of New England - had reached the same conclusion a few months before AP published his findings in Theory Is Good For You.)
At their plutocratic peak the Silk-Farrs owned a woollen mill, a quarry, a coal mine, a limeworks, and acres of prime Somerset farmland. In the classic work The Rise and Fall of a Twiverton Dynasty a forensic investigation is made of the somewhat murky origins of the Silk-Farr wealth. The spurious claim that its portfolio included the very same slave plantation in Antigua so fleetingly mentioned in Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park is shown to be quite groundless. The original source of the Silk-Farr's capital (or 'equity' as the discrete bourgeoisie prefer to call it) was wool and specifically the "sheep ate men" fields of the county of Cumberland. As for the mythology that is peddled to this day by the pamphleteers of Glastonbury - that the lineage of the Silk-Farrs can be traced directly back to Merlin the Wizard and King Arthur - this is nailed once and for all.
Too many brows have been furrowed by the final sentence of The Rise and Fall of a Twiverton Dynasty. This is a quotation from Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) - one of Marx's favourite authors - but with a question mark added in golden print. So instead of "Behind every fortune lies a great crime" the book's final sentence reads:

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime?"

Why the question mark is what everyone asks. The book's anonymous authors (who now describe themselves as "post-Marxists") have now made everything clear. The adding of the golden printed question mark symbolised a critique of their former ideological stance. It was an acknowledgement of the entrepreneurial flair, the enduring sense of civic responsibility and the personal integrity displayed by the Silk-Farrs during those long Twiverton years. (The Silk-Farrs' company went bankrupt in 1954 and their beloved Italian Villa was demolished in 1963.) Here was a family of property whose legacy went far beyond property to touch people's hearts for generations to come. In these more tawdry times The Prefab Files rise to salute them.