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.