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.