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.