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.