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."