The evolution of prefabs took a great leap forward in 1830. A London carpenter - H. John Manning - made some pre-cut (pre-fabricated) pieces of timber. These were then stored on board the ship his son took to Australia and assembled into the 'Manning Portable Colonial Cottage' on arrival. Another New World boost to prefab evolution came sixty years later when self-assembly prefab packs were posted off to 'I can if Yukon!" prospectors in the Klondike.
These were the inspiration for the Sears Roebuck & Co. 'prefabs by mail order' business that was set up in 1908 and survived for another thirty-two years.
The 1950s was the hey-day of the Saturday morning film matinee. Young doubles of Roy Rodgers, the Lone Ranger, and Hopalong Cassidy would be seen waiting in ambush for Copper Jones. (Only to flee and hurl their silver six-guns away should this awesome figure ever
appear out of the blue and start cycling towards them.) The Rebel Without A Cause who lived at prefab number twenty-six would never dream of stepping out of his front door without first putting on his stylish Wyatt Earp-style bootlace tie. As a young boy he would set up his train-set in the front garden, play quietly away for hours, and avoid any rough games on the greens. Then he caught sight of a teddy boy walking by, decided to become one himself, had a big row with his
parents, and the day after his sixteenth birthday was never seen on the estate again.
German Enlightenment thinkers described architecture as frozen music. If you could de-frost a 1950s prefab it would unleash the pulsating beat of Frankie Lane's Rawhide! If you tried
de-frosting one of the prefabs on our estate in the months before they were demolished a melancholy heart-wrenching Mahler symphony would overwhelm you.

When our class was told we would have to stay behind for an extra hour and chant 'good idea' none of us thought it was a good ideal. How could we have known that what was a "good ideal" in Somerset was known as a "good idea" in more respectable parts of the country! (Of course those who went round our estate saying "Plato had some good ideals" could not be faulted.)
'Tubby' Lard - resident of prefab number seven - made a big stand about having to be made to learn RSE ('Received Standard English'.) Hardly a school day would go by without him muttering "Received By Whom?" under his breath.
A few days after the Soviet Union sent its Sputnik satellite into space in October 1957 a new word rocketed its way into our local lingo: prefabnik. This was not (as was first thought) a slur implying a liking for illegally taking other people's goods by prefab dwellers. The Dictionary Of Prefab Argot explains that it simply means "a person who has resided in a prefab for a number of years." A prefab (or fabpre as the cider drinkers up in Englishcombe Village prefer to call it) is defined as a "a pale low-slung sprout-topped detached bungalow typically made of steel, asbestos, and plaster board. After blazing a meteor-like way across the night sky of the 1940s it never won the cultural or aesthetic recognition it deserved."
(Go to the Dictionary's technical appendix and you will find that a prefab weighs almost a ton and covers nearly a thousand square feet of floor space. A gang with a crane was able to erect a prefab in two or three days. (When the first prefabs were being constructed in Twiverton the watching crowd was heard to cry out: "What an erection!")
Prefabs do not just have walls and a roof. They have a bath and inside toilet, an airing cupboard, and a kitchen with a refrigerator and an electric cooker. This should be enough for anyone. Dai 'Pascal' Lectic (a cousin of the resident of prefab number one) says "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a prefab room alone"
On frost-bitten mornings when an icy wind is lashing the delicate skin of our thin-walled dwellings residents have to spring into action. Prefabs in winter do not warm themselves up! Sir Robert Scott's British Antartica Expedition of 1912 showed people how to die in war. Prefabs in winter show people how to live in a cold climate. Just watch the finesse with which prefabniks hop down their back steps, unlatch the coal shed doors, shovel coal supplies into their buckets, zoom back into the sitting-rooms, clean out the grates and remove the ashes of the previous day, deposit them on their back garden paths, deftly place wood into an optimum heat-generating formation in the fireplace, crumple up newspapers (always keeping a few pages in reserve in case toilet paper supplies run out), strike matches against the sanded edges of their England's Glory matchboxes, and shout out "ignition!" in Cape Canaveral style the moment a purple flame flickers into life.
After the flecks of debris have been swept up from the floor prefabniks will be seen sauntering into the kitchen and munching slices of crisply burnt toast. On a Saturday morning there will be time to leaf through a few pages of the Daily Mirror (or - if intellectual appetites have been whetted - a volume of The Bricklayer or a few pages the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.) This will be followed by a few moments "to stand and stare" before re-connecting with the maelstrom of life.

Back in the eighteenth century young aristocrats went on grand tours to visit sites of classical civilisation. Here in the mid-twentieth century young prefab aristocrats go on grand tours to visit enamel furnaces.
In 1957 the old man took my brother on a visit to the enamel furnaces of Brussels and Paris. Mr Van de Zee of the Derro Company paid all their hotel and travel expenses! I pinned up a map of their planned route was pinned up on the bedroom wall. A blue line showed their train trip to Harwich, the sea crossing to the Hook of Holland, and the train ride to Brussels. (The young aristocrats of the eighteenth century sailed from Dover to Calais and made their land journeys by horse.)
A red line showing the location of the 'Iron Curtain' was added to the bedroom wall map to give a touch of Cold War suspense. If you ended up on the wrong side of the red line there was a risk of being dragged out of your bed and shot. (Only later did we cotton on to the sad fact that people on our 'free west' side - such as those living in the Spain of General Franco - were being taken out and shot as well.)
There was a familiar knock on our front door a full week before the two grand torers were due to return. It was the old man (wearing his 'wild colonial' look) and my brother. The old man had a
massive black eye. "The Grand Tour", he said, "had gone rather well." As for his newly-sculptured facial architecture this ("cough! cough!") was the result of an emamel furnace brick falling on his head.
Within a few days the beans had been spilled. The dreaded official officials had struck again. The Paris police are not renowned for their devotion to the Copper Jones' Queensbury Rules methods of crime control. The Fourth Republic was in deep trouble at this time. Military coups were being plotted by generals who were siding with the beleaguered settlers in Algeria. The arrivale of the furnace bricklayer from the prefabs with his American movie-style hat would have been an object of suspicion from the moment he stepped out of the train from Brussels. train. Fortunately the Derro Company secured his speedy release from custody. (How many times in history has a labourer been rescued from the claws of the state by the forces of trans-national capital!)
Although the days of the Fourth Republic were numbered, the gallois enamels furnace bricklayer helped keep the profits of the Derro Company going for another two decades.

Dark Footnote: In 1961 two hundred Algerians who were on a protest march in Paris were killed by the police.

The old man is wary of officials - and that is official! Not just income tax officials, Ministry of Labour officials/national insurance officials/council office officials/passport officials/housing department officials/border control officials/rent collection officials/electoral registration officials/medical officials, but - and most of all - the official officials who are members of Her Majesty's Constabulary.
The old man's ancestors include the Teagues of Truro. Perhaps these Cornish horse-traders had nothing to do with the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685. But its aftermath certainly made an impact on the clan's mind-set. After the rising had been ruthlessly crushed Judge Jefferies orderd the execution of two hundred rebels and had a further two hundred transported into slavery in the Carribean. Children would shudder with fear if they were told that that "Judge Jefferies" was keeping an eye on them. When some of the Teagues moved to the coal mines and iron works of
South Wales the official officials would be drafted in by the State to ensure that the property of the employing class was safeguarded during strikes and lock-outs.
In 1956 the old man arrived at Bristol Temple Meads railway station in the early hours of the morning to find he had missed the connecting train to Twiverton. After setting out on the ten mile walk home the heavens opened up and torrents of rain poured down. As he paused for breath and rested his water-logged furnace bricklayer's travel bag on the pavement he saw that an official official's car was tracking his every move. His request to be given a few minutes of temporary shelter was hilariously dismissed.
The only official official who the old man holds in high regards is bike-pedalling Copper Jones. His job is to put the coercive arm of the state into our prefab estate. Although some Twivertonians belive that even Copper Jones has his "dark side"the old man concedes that he carries out his duties on our esate with considerable panache.
Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic from prefab number one once engaged the old man in a long kitchen debate on the role of the official officials. Theey concluded that the police had a complex dual function of both safeguarding the sectional interests of the powerful and protecting the general good as well. Dai had a vinegar-stained copy of Edward Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' in his carrier bag (the Romans really loved vinegar!) This book posed one of the trickiest of questions regarding institutions which specialise in applying armed force: Who guards the guards? How do the unarmed control those they have armed?
.....................................................................................................................................................................

Monmouth Rebellion Postscript: In 1688 a group of upper class plotters met in a grand house in Chesterfield. They proceeded to do what the Duke of Monmouth had failed to do just three years before - make a 'Glorious Revolution' and overthrow the Stuart Monarchy. But regime change is a tricky business. A review of Bath. A Social History 1680-1850 or A Valley of Pleasure, Yet A Sink of Iniquity (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) by R.S.Neale (published in the TLS) makes the following point: "What counts with regime change is not just what is done, but how it is done and who does the done."

Gary Bollard of prefab number four could hardly believe his luck when he spotted a mouth-watering "without obligation!" advertisement in Tit-Bits magazine. Here was a onece in a lifetime chance of obtaining a "magnificent set of commemorative stamps" at a "bargain basement price" from "the Principality's premier philatelist emporium." If customers were not
"completely - satisfied" they could return them "without charge!" For Gary Bollard -Twiverton's answer to Stanley Gibbons - opportunity had well and truly knocked.
Gary was on tenterhooks as he waited for the magnificent set of commemorative stamps to arrive. However the postman ignored prefab nuber four, and Gary began to have nightmarish visions of the stamps being sent not to Woodhedge Road in Twiverton but to the vile and accursed Woodhedge Road of Tiverton in Devon. "The name of Tiverton should be banished from the English language!" Gary cried out whenever he passed a red pillar box. Then, quite out of the blue - and a full fortnight later - a "magnificent set of commemorative stamps" burst its rapturous way through the narrow opening of Gary Bollard's letter-box. The ecstatic rapture did not last for long. There can be few cases of philatelist interruptis which have produced such a dismal sense of anti-climax. The magnificent set of commemorative stamps must have been trodden on by dozens of size twelve steel-tipped mud-covered post-office sorting room boots. If the stamps had gone twelve rounds in the ring with Jack Dempsey or Rocky Marciano - or "twelve rounds with Jack Dempsey and Rocky Marciano" as 'Tubby' Lard would later remark - they would have been in far better shape.
After regaining his composure a downcast Gary headed off to the post office and sent the battered package back to the principality's de luxe emporium. The words "GOODS RECEIVED IN DAMAGED CONDITION!" were written in large black capital letters on the parcel's front and back. This was to be of no avail. Almost before you could say "Joseph Stalin's paranoid terror-state delighted in rooting out rootless cosmopolitans who camouflaged their dealings with British intelligence under an innocuous stamp-collecting veneer" a fuming-at-the-mouth letter catapulted its way back to the prefab at number four Woodhedge Road. In icy cool KGB style language it warned: "Contact will be made with with the Somerset constabulary unless a compensatory payment of two pounds and ten shillings is returned forthwith! The magnificent free sample we posted to your contemptible trailer-trash abode appears to have been deliberately trampled underfoot!"
Of course it does! The moment any item of value lands on one of our estate's bedraggled door-mats we drag it into the vermin-infested back yard and trample it underfoot with our mud-splattered hob-nail boots. Such are the mores and customs of Prefab Land.
Copper Jones consoled Gary with the thought that he had at least learnt a salutary lesson about succumbing to the meretricious blandishments of capitalism. The glad, confident mornings spent idly leafing through the inviting advertisements of Tit-Bits magazine were gone, never to return. The wisdom of the cryptic words of Twerton Villa's football coach about "keeping it tight at the back" had at long last been understood.
As it was said in the valleys of South Wales during the 1920s and 1930s: "Experience is a hard school, but fools will learn at no other."

There are days when an undertow of emotion emerges out of nowhere to overwhelm the most ordinary of days. This is what happened to 'Tubby' Lard as he was making his way to the Weymouth House Technical School. (The curriculum of this school was so unrelentingly technical that "technically" there was doubt as to whether it was really a school at all.)
'Tubby' had given his usual 5A bus ride a miss in a bid to start improving his fitness. As he
walked down How Hill he drew in a deep breath and savoured the rich whiff of brewery yeast that lingers around the My Full Moon before whistling a happy tune. It was not long before his cracking pace had taken him to the spooky grime-encrusted railway arch by the Lower Bristol Road. As he passed under it an unknown girl zoomed by on her bike and shouted: "Out of the way, you fat slob!"
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!" This was a phrase which was often heard echoing around the prefab estate, and it was a phrase which carried little conviction. The words of the unknown girl hit 'Tubby' Lard with such a force that just a few months later 'Tubby' Lard could be called tubby no more. The malign jibe galvanised him out of his flabby "pile some more sugar on my Weetabix' lethargy" and changed the direction of his life.
In fact if 'Tubby' had not been walking through the grime-encrusted railway arch at that very moment he might never have joined the (now legendary) No Pain, No Gain! weightlifting Club, set up in the prefabs and his dreams of sporting success would have remained mere Walter Mitty phantoms of a flabby day-dreaming self.
As the jibe-hurling fast-projectile mounted girl sped by pedestrian 'Tubby' she felt over-whelmed by the high-fuelled energy of her life. "My life is going great, so let's make it feel even better by mocking this fat peasant!" The fact that she was wearing a grammar school uniform added another grain of salt into 'Tubby' Lard's freshly-inflicted wound. She (he mistakingly assumed) would be engrossed all day in studies of Renaissance art and literary criticism. He would be spending the entire afternoon sawing and chiselling away in the classroom that had been converted from Twiverton's old prison in the company of the deranged sideburned-knuckle-duster wearing crypto-Teddy Boy woodwork teacher. She was on course for life membership of the 'Nietzsche Society' (motto: the more bile you puke out on weak types who do not bash you back the better you are going to feel.) He had unwittingly co-opted himself into the 'Keep Your Head Down And Be Kind To Others Society' (motto: prepare to get hammered into pulp). She would be on a permanent high while he would be on a hiding to nothing.
The intersection of two life-trajectories under the grime-encrusted railway arch - those of the jibe-hurling girl and the pedestrian 'Tubby' - poses the perennial "Who Would You Rather Be?" question. Would you prefer to be like the overweight pedestrian 'Tubby' - a slow-moving target for every passing chariot-racing Wagnerian spear-thrower - or the lithe lean-limbed fast-moving jibe-hurling girl who feels the exhileration of the wind racing through her hair as she dispenses cathartic verbal kicks to any plodding losers whose shadows light her way?
Years later 'Tubby' Lard would feel a strange debt of gratitude to the "fat slob!" yelling girl whose face he could never remember. He would find himself wondering whether she was still racing through life with that same turbo-fuelled spite-filled elan, or whether fate had tired of her egoism and inflicted some sobering reversal of fortune under her own grime-encrusted railway arch. When 'Tubby' Lard's photograph made the front page of the Bath & Wilting he was shown holding the Somerset Weightlifting Trophy aloft. You could just about make out a "my claws are no longer blunt" tattoo (a quote from Mr F. Nietzsche) on his muscle-bound chest. As that 1950s' philosopher Charles Atlas discovered, deep in the psyche of many world famous body builders is a seven stone weakling who had sand kicked in his face.
One of 'Tubby' Lard's many dreams is to have the following words engraved in silver lettering on
Twiverton's famous grime encrusted railway arch:

"Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head."

'As You Like It'
Act 2 Scene 1.

"It's a free country!" is a phrase you hear all the time on our estate. (Maybe as memories of the struggle against Hitler fade it will be heard less and less.) "It's a man's world!" is what girls say to you with a steely glint in their eyes (which means they will make sure it is not going to stay that way for much longer). "Looking for something to do" is what kids say on grey lacklustre days when they are not in the mood for a game of football. DPs - Displaced Persons - whose lives have been broken by the Nazi gangsters look back on their past and say "Hindsight is no good!" or "It has been more than flesh and blood can stand!" On some days the old man returns from town and talks of encounters with "tenth-rate punks." (He is yet to encounter any "first-rate punks.") My tough cousin from South Wales warns anyone looking for trouble that he will
"knock them into the middle of next week." "Why was he born so beautiful, why was he born at all? He's no bloody use to anyone, he's no bloody use at all!" This is the song which some people sing when they walk by the Smileys' prefab.
The old man must be one of the strongest labourers on the estate, and he still cannot believe he was turned down by each of the armed services on unspecified health grounds when he tried to sign up in 1939. Perhaps if he had been allowed to join up he would have ended up "dying in the western desert" (another favourite phrase) in the battles against Rommel.) During the war he worked on Avonmouth docks before going off to help build the floating Mulberry Harbours that were used in the D-Day invasion.
Once we were sat around the kitchen table having breakfast. I asked the old man: "So what did you do in the war?" "I was in the Japanese Navy!" came his lightening reply.

In pride of place in the art gallery that is our sitting-room is The Chinese Girl (or the Green Lady as it is sometimes called.) It was modelled on Lenka, the girl friend of the Russian painter Vladimir Tretchikoff who he met in a New York restaurant. It has been called the "The Mona Lisa of the British Working Class." Whenever the public school boys who produce Private Eye want to make fun out of the lower-orders they can be relied on to show a cartoon of a council house interior with The Chinese Girl painting in the background. It makes readers smile everytime.
While recuperating from his labours as a furnace bricklayer the old man enjoys sitting in his armchair with a box of Swan Vesta matches, cigarette papers and a roll-up of Old Holborne tobacco within easy reach. (If he has just returned from the Continent there will be a box of Dutch cigars and a bottle of brandy.) 'Monty' Porter was baffled by his fascination with art and asked him "what's it all about." The old man tells him it can send numinous shivers down the spine, smuggle secret tips from the past on how life should be led, and conjure up the sound of a guitar being played on a lonely hillside. "Above all - as Hegel said - 'art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.'" Then he brings everything down with a thud by turning towards me and saying: "Nip down the shop, son, and get a couple of ounces of Old Holborne tobacco and a box of matches."
The Chinese Girl is taking everything in - the laughter, the hopes, the arguments, the forebodings and apprehensions. She can sense that we are going through tricky times. The Chinese Girl never returns our gaze. Even surprise tactics (like creeping in to the sitting-room on all fours and firing off a lightening glance in her direction) never catch her off guard. Perhaps she is immersed in her own concerns and brooding about being called a Girl when anyone can see she is a grown-up woman. She could be thinking about the indignities that have been inflicted on Chinese civilisation by the onslaught of colonialism. Or maybe she has some inkling about what is going to befall us. 'Que sera sera!' - "the future not being ours to see" - is the popular song of the moment - and when it is played on the wireless her eyes almost seem to flicker.
Prints of The Chinese Girl painting first went on sale in 1952. The old man was one of the first people in Bath to buy one. This fact does not impress everyone. Once I was looking through the window of the art shop in Green Street which has a copy of The Chinese Girl is on display. Two well-heeled characters then came and stood behind me. They stared at the painting with great intensity for a few minutes and then started laughing. One of them chortled: "The painting before us represents the very essence of plebeian taste!"

A number of the books which circulated around the prefab estate had their source in the back bar of the Ring O 'Bells inn which doubled up as a free library. Without it the old man might never have got hold of a copy of Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by W.H. Davies. This was a cult book in the South Wales valleys, not least because of the vivid description the author gives of having one of his legs sliced off while jumping trains in America. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle depicts the slaughtering machine of the Chicago stockyards, and was a favourite with the Ring O'Bell's landlord. He would tell the back bar drinkers that "it pre-figured what Germany did in Poland in the early 1940s." For drinkers in search of some lighter reading the landlord would recommend Flann O'Brien's The Hard Life. This warns its readers that "all the persons in this book are real and none is fictitious even in part" (which also applies to The Prefab Files.) One of the Ring O'Bells' regulars was never seen in the pub again after becoming convinced that the Gaelic character Macsamailliun Ui Phionasa (Maximillian O' Penisa) was a deliberate take on him.
The most borrowed book in the Ring O'Bells' library was Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge. "Shady people in sunny places" was Maugham's description of his neighbours in the South of France, and "Shady people in an unsunny place" was how the Ring O'Bells' landlord (with tongue in cheek) would refer to his book borrowing clientele. Borrowers of The Razor's Edge wpuld be told "to look out for Mr Maugham's stylish use of the colon."
A passage in a Mikhal Sholokhov novel on the brutal treatment meted out to prisoners-of-war in Russia touched a raw nerve with the old man. (His father had been a prisoner of war in Germany during the First World War. He had left the coal mines, enlisted in the army, and after being captured was sent to work down a German coalmine. His jet black hair had turned completely white by the time he returned home.
"My father was not treated like that!" the old man said after reading the Sholokhov passage. He felt that the author had given impliicit moral approval of these dreadful acts, and never read another of his books. When Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front was left on Ossie Oster's kitchen table his mum was taken aback. "It was banned in Germany" she whispered.
Our prefabs were not just literary gold mines. They were places that had been scarred by history.

Every prefab has its secret places. There is endless speculation on what the Swileys in prefab number twenty-five keep hidden away in the brown suitcase in the back of their (always locked up) coalhouse. Our secret places are the compartment of the travel trunk which stands in the hallway (the rent book, bank book, passports and fire insurance papers are kept here) and the bottom drawer in the cupboard with built-in metal drawers in the sitting-room. This serves as the treasure trove for valued cultural artefacts. Take a lucky dip here and you could retrieve any of the following: a Football Monthly or Woman's Own, assorted pieces of Meccano, scores of subbuteo table footballers (many of which have been unfortunately decapitated), a miniature relica of world champion Juan Manuel Fangio's racing car, a guide to the night sky purchased in
the London Planetarium, a picture of John Charles signing for Juventus football club (this marks the start of International Football Capitalism), a bundle of Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained!
labels from the Children's Book Club, a cigar tin with an unlit Dutch cigar inside, and a hit-record from the Platters called Smoke Gets In Your Eyes which is biding its time until we get a record-player.)
One of the most unsettling books lent to the old man by Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic (resident of prefab number one and one of our leading literatis) was the Selected Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. It had one line which impressed us all a lot. It was about redeeming the past and transforming every 'It was' into 'I wanted it thus!' "If only we could do that!" the old man said. Most of the other sections of the book did not go down well at all. Nietzsche seems to have been keen on weak people perishing. Those who live in fragile temporary constructions like prefabs are weak by definition, so that was all of us done for. Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic told us that Nietzsche's sister was an unpleasant woman who turned Nietzsche's home into a Nazi shrine and museum.
It is said that not long before he died Nietzsche saw a horse being savagely beaten. Instead of joining in the fun and giving the weak horse an extra beating - which is what some readers might have expected - Nietzsche embraced it and started to weep. This image of the beaten horse being caressed by the philosopher was to linger in the imagination of some people on our prefab estate for a long time.

There is tons to read in our prefab. Eight encyclopaedic Books Of Knowledge, a Book Of Hobbies (both of these are encased in the heavy red covers you can glimpse in the libraries of country houses), a Concise Oxford Dictionary. ("Written in 1917 before my brother's death " says its eerie preface), plus a three volume set of The Bricklayer which the old man is trowelling his way through.
Other cargo scattered our prefab deck includes a biography of General Rommel, Biggles novels,
a crime thriller called I'll Say She Does! which has a garish cover, a fitness training manual by the Australian coach Percy Cerutty ("Mix different types of breakfast cereal together and run on sand dunes!"), and a Charles Atlas dynamic tension booklet which will stop seven stone weaklings having sand kicked in their faces. Give Mr Atlas just fifteen minutes a day and you will be a changed man!
From the word go prefabs were arenas for political debate, so do not be surprised to se a few copies of Encounter magazine here. This is not (as 'Tubby' Lard thought) a guide on chatting up girls but a high-powered monthly journal of ideas. It specialises in finely written articles on 'The God That Failed' (i.e. the idea of communism). Some people dismiss it as "'soft power' Cold War propaganda" and say it is funded by the USA's Central Intelligence Agency. According to Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic this is indeed the case - "it is the West's answer to the Red Army Choir and the Bolshoi Ballet." But he reckons it beats reading V.I. Lenin's Speeches at Party Congresses (1918-1922) by a mile.
The Ring magazine keeps afloat without needing undercover payments from anyone. One of the back issues we have has photographs of Floyd Patterson's defeat by Ingemar Johansson in the 1959 world heavyweight championship. (It also mentions an amazing young boxer called Cassius Clay). Never make the mistake of confusing The Ring boxing magazine with Wagner's Ring - the one which Adolf Schicklgruber and his Nazi gangster pals always raved on about. (Mark Twain was on to something when he said Wagner's music "is better than it sounds", and 'Ossie' Oster in prefab number seventeen complains that it always gives him a feeling of wanting to bomb Warsaw.)
1959 was also the year when everyone on the estate seemed to have a copy of T.S.Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in their side pocket or carrier bag. After 'Ossie' came across Eliot's poem 'Bubank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar' we decided to give him a miss.
Prefab dwellers have gained a reputation for hiding their lights under bushes. "They hide their
'real' reading inside copies of Tit-Bits or Reveille" is what is often said.
Unfortunately in most cases the only thing that is hidden under a copy of Tit-Bits is another copy of Tit-Bits.