Perhaps it was historically inevitable, but the inevitable can still take you by surprise! A crack squad from Duck's Son and Winker (the west country's top media firm) has fixed an aerial on to the coalhouse roof. At first all you could see on the television screen was a misty blur of swirling dots and slow-motion dancing shadows. This was followed by a shape which resembled the grinning face of Mr Sliley next door poking out his tongue and wriggling his ears. When all seemed lost -and with Duck's Son and Winker poised to call it a day - there was a cry of 'ignition!' and our television picture burst into crystal clear clarity. That was when the radiant face of Lady Isobel Barnett made its elegant entrance into our star-struck sitting-room for the very first time.
The departure of my brother for Australia had created an emptiness that had to be filled. The TV set provided gave aus a sense of ersartz consolation. It was tinged with a residue of guilt: maybe he would have stayed here longer if our new entertainment complex had been in place.
Hoisting a television aerial up on your coalhouse roof is like waying a "We have joined the mainstream!" flag. Admittedly our flag looks almsot at half-mast. It takes just half a second to tell whether a household's aerial can pick up both the ITV and the BBC channels. So it was historically inevitable that within a few minutes of our brave new TV aerial flag being unfurled to the world one of the Slileys would lean out of his window and say: "Only got one channel then!"
Getting one had been a giant step for us - but in a fast-moving Consumer Society the goalposts keep on changing.
The old wireless life still lives on, especially in the early and late hours. The other night we were captiavted by a broadcast about a brash and super-confident American tycoon. The interviewer
asked him to spell out the key qualities that are needed to achieve business success. His two line answer penetrated the easy-going languor of our prefab like a cool icicle of unwelcome realism. "You must remember one thing" he said. (There was a brief pause which served to heighten the impact of the brash and super-confident tycoon's message. What a salesman this guy was!)

"Everything in this life revolves around the intelligent pursuit of self-interest!"

Not in this prefab, buster!

Going up to the Protter's place in Downie Combe before 1962 was great fun. There was football in the yard, table tennis, sparring matches with real boxing gloves, and general larking around! Then - in the twinkling of an eye - it all changed. And the eye that twinkled was to be found in the corner of the Protters' sitting-room. Everything changed the moment the Protters got one! And this was not just a Protter phenomenon. Whole swathes of the country changed the moment people got one! The hunger for getting one seemed to get completely out of control. One day time itself willhave to be re-designated anew. Instead of BC or BCE (Before the Common Era)
BTV (Before TeleVision) will become a new parameter of time, and ATV (After TeleVision) will send Anno Domini and ACE packing.
The triumph of the 'great indoors' in the 1960s was not a pretty sight. Curtains started to be drawn at five o'clock on bright Summer days. (This was code for "Keep Away! - We Prefer Our Goggle Box's Company To Yours!".) If your luck is in and you gain admittance into the darkened inner sanctum the Glazed Eyes of the Newly Dead will not offer any welcome. You will be tol to remain mute, and if this rule is broken a rush of shushes and hisses will make it clear that you have overstayed your 'welcome'. When you take your leave and bid a fond farewell to your dlightful hosts their leaden eyelids will barely register the sweet sorrow of your tip-toed departure.
By 1962 the "when are you getting one?" question had winged its way into every street in the land. Soon nine of of ten ATV households would be spending night after night surfing along on the Big Wave of Electronic Change. For a brief while a small band of rebels on Prefab Estate Island pledged to stay in their BTV wireless lifeboats. This was ditched overboard as soon as a critical mass of Newtin Road prefabs had gone out and got one. The slick salesman in the corner prefab had amazed everyone by going out and getting one back in 1954! 'Tubby' Lard's 'dark horse' family was not all that far behind. Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic suddenly stopped quoting his favourite line from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty about refusing "to bow the knee" to convention and could barely hide his joy when he told his next door neighbour that "he was getting one." The phrase "Did you listen to...?" was hardly heard anymore, even if The Goons (going strong since 1950) had been on the night before. Those without one feel like disenfranchised serfs washed up from the Middle Ages.
The "when are you going to get one?" question was never going to go away. It would prowl around the woods in the middle of the night, paces back and forth up the fron path at mid-day, poke its shiny screened dot-filled face through front windows of wireless only sitting rooms, and give out blasts of phoney synthetic pseudo-laughter and ecstatic audience applause from inside the coalhouses of TV-less households. One one occasion it prodded its long silver aerial up our letter-box. Wireless-only households could see that they were completely surrounded. They knew that the atmosphere of intimidation would never let up. The Big Question Of The Day
would follow your bus home and leap out of the rent man's and milkman's and postman's lips. It was whispered in the barber's shop if no other customers were there. It might have been possible to evade it back in 1955 - but there was no evading it now. Even the birds circling above the prefab roofs were starting to screech it out: "When the heck are you going to get one!"

The 1950s could be generous times. For example we loaned our bike - our prefab's only bike - to the charitable cause of the Protters of Downie Combe. In way of celebrating the very first pay cheque the old man received from Derro Enamels my mum bought an all but new pram for Mrs Downhill of prefab number nineteen.
The Protters' own spirit of generosity came to an abrupt end in 1962. Prior to this watershed year - if anyone on our estate was to fall on hard times with their kitchen cupboard being Spam-less and bare - the Protters would be sure to come to the rescue. Who will forget the time when they used one of their free British Railways travel passes to take 'Ossie' oster on a day trip to Devon and buy him ham and tomato sandwiches in Dawlish's famed Black Horse public house!
Perhaps Downie Combe had something to do with the shift in the Protters' mood. Located on a hillside some six miles south-east of Twiverton, Downuie Combe has come to be a cultural weather vane of the shifting Zeitgeist of the age. It was from 1962 on that more and more Downie Combe-ites found themselves residing in two-income households which began to ooze novel amounts of surplus cash. this was even noticed by the editor of the Bath & Wilting: "A spirit of possessive individualism is edging its furtive way intothis community's once fraternal enclaves." A freshly painted sign erected by the International Situationists said "Welcome to Look-After-Number-One-Ville". "It gives a new sense of tone to the neighbourhood" declared a local councillor who was full of admiration for its mix of brown and blue paints.
Iy was in 1962 that Don 'the angler' Protter vowed never again to use any of his free British Railways' travel passes for causes other than his own. Soon he was bragging that "he had never been seen drunk by any of his kids." His youngest son moved to Belfast and joined a group of 'born again' evangelists. "All genocides are the Almighty's way of punishing sinners" was their distinctive ideological line.
Stroll up to the Protters' old abode in Downie Combe and you can still see our old prefab bike rusting away in their back yard.

After watching two episodes of an American TV series called Perry Mason 'Ossie' Oster of prefab number seventeen was inspired to apply for a job as a trainee common law clerk at King Sized & Withering Fees, a firm of Solicitors and Commissioners for All Kinds of Oaths . Kids from the estate who went to East Hill gravitated towards jobs in garages and butchers' shops, while kids who went to Weymouth House Technical School acquired an aversion for anything that was 'technical' and tried to became Admiralty or insurance clerks. The high-flying grammar school son of the slick salesman on the corner prefab started to make some discrete inquiries about vacancies for Viceroys in the remaining colonial dependencies and openings on the board of Coutts' Bank. Those of an adventurous temperament responded to advertisements placed in the press by the Hong Kong Police Department (GCE English and 5'7" height were key requirements.)
There had once been a time when young prefab dwellers were tactfully advised to keep their prefab dwelling residence a closely guarded secret when applying for an 'office type' job. That was before Gary Bollard of Woodhedge Road made his astonishing breakthrough. Quite out of the blue he was offered the prestigious post (albeit temporary) of 'roving arts correspondent' with the Walcot & Bath Arts and Literary Festival. (His talents as a ukulele player swung the interviewing panel his way.) Once embarked on this glittering career the phrase "walls of the mind" was never far from Gary's lips. He would explain that - while East Berliners had recently found themselves imprisoned by a real wall which divided their city - residents of our prefab estate were prone to imprison themselves behind a self-made wall of class segregation. While his 'roving arts correspondent' post lasted for five all too brief Spring and Summer months, Gary's upbeat temperament was a source of inspiration to us all. He had an unshakeable conviction that what he called "human agency" could overcome the most formidable of social barriers. This conviction stayed with him for the rest of his working life. (Or in Gary's case for the rest of his non-working life, since he has ended up setting a new Twiverton record in the number of years spent signing on at the Ministry of Labour.)
At around the same time as Gary was roving around the Walcot & Bath art world a resident of prefab number seventeen was trying to break into journalism. Despite being a school friend of Dawk 'the print' Goodall - the son of a wheeler dealer in the local media industry - his hoped-for interview with the Bath & Wilting failed to materialise. Plan A had to be abandoned, and Plan B - joining the merchant navy - was soon abandoned as well. (His four GCE passes did not include maths, and this was a key requirement.) Fortunately Plan C - being given a time slot at the paint-peeling pockmarked Ministry of Labour building in Avon Street - was their for the taking.
Back in the eighteenth century recurring plagues of cholera had afflicted Avon Street. It was therefore seen as an ideal location for a Ministry of Labour office. Plan C did not fail, and the young resident of prefab number seventeen was soon starting work as a 'trainee manager' with the Devizes branch of the Tread On Simpson footware chain. After being infected with the itchy feet syndrome (a perennial problem in this line of work) he signed up for a ten pound passage to Australia.

After months of back-breaking-sweat-filled-enamel-furnace-bricklaying on the Continent
("Harwich for the continent and Frinton for the incontinent" was the jest of this era) the old man
returns home for some well-earned rest.

"Sleeping is no mean art: you need to stay awake all day to do it." (F.Nietzsche).
(Not when you have been labouring away in enamel furnaces.)

The back garden would have been lulled into the deepest of sleeps during the long weeks of the old man's absence. On his return it had no inkling of the ferocious rate of digging that was poised to overwhelm it. Even seconds before a frenzied demented attack was launched by the spade and fork pincer movement the forest of foliage, weeds and dandelions would still be idly swaying nonchalantly to and fro in the breeze without a worry in the world.
Within two or three days the soil would have been turned over, plumb-lined rows of potatoes and cabbages set in place, and the ash-filled garden path firmed up. With the prefab's rear returned to its "ship-shape and Bristol fashion" grandeur the telescopic lens of the oldman's advance battalion turned to eye up the garden in the front. The first casualties would be the lawn and prefab number seventeen's famous light green speckled hedge. Both would receive the
"take-no-prisoners short-back-and sides' treatment" (known locally as a 'Ray Rosewarn' after Twiverton's most celebrated and most politically informed barber.)
The prolific work-rate of the old man evokes awestruck admiration. "So that is why he got that Derro Enamels job!" people would mutter. (Going from fourteen year old coalminer to hotel expenses paid international bricklayer represented an epic feat of social mobility.) It never took long before the name of Alexey Stakhanov sprang from people's lips. Stakhanov was the Hero of Socialist Labour whose world historic feat was to mine 227 tons of coal in a single shift in Russia in 1937. This made such an impact that his beaming features were to appear on the cover of Time Magazine. No such plaudits would ever be bestowed on the prefabs' Jack Morgan. And yet - as any dispassionate observer of the semi-miraculous transformation of our prefab's back garden will be the first to tell you - he was clearly up there in the Alexey Stakhanov super-productive worker aristocracy league.
With the feats of heroic labour completed the old man puts on his American movie Humphrey Bogarte-style hat and catch the 5A bus into town. The first port of call is the plush bank in Milsom Street - the one with the elegant ceiling which is lined with chandeliers. This is where a near-empty wallet will be filled to the brim with ten shilling and one pound notes. The second port of call will be one of Bath's fine "Wine of the Gods!" drinking haunts. (There will be no third port of call.) After arduous weeks of labour, of dark nights of proletarian exile, of aching muscles and mountains of bricks, of days filled with sweat and cement dust, of evenings caressed with lonely thoughts of home, an interlude has arrived which was to be sweetly savoured.
The old man strides into Smith's Wine Vaults, salutes the landlord, invites him to "have one on me", lights up a Dutch cigar, and begins to celebrate the joys of his resurrected prefab life.

George Rotinoff was known as "the Isambard Kingdom Brunel of prefab engineering." He used his shipbuilding expertise to design a the 'New Model' prefab. This had all kinds of jazzy accessories: sinks with double drainers, dry goods cupboards, and drop-flat tables. You name it, George Rotinoff's 'New Model Prefab' had it! - apart from spheres.
It was R. Buckminster Fuller who designed the sphere-shaped prefab, and he first put it on display in a Chicago department store in 1929. Some people immediately said: "We have seen the pre-fabricated future - and it is round!" In 1949 Buckminster Fuller took the world by storm once again when his lightweight aluminium geodesic Wichita House went on show.
Art college students spend endless hours debating whether form or function, beauty or utility, should be the dominant principle of design. The prefab truth is that you can have both. "Form follows function!" is the philosophy which underlies our 'AIROH Aluminium' prefabs. Seeing how the coalhouses and water butts stand guard like heroic sentinels can take your breath away.
The homeless people of the world are crying out for somewhere to live. Some people say that prefabs - whether rectangular or geodesic - have had their day as a policy answer to this urgent social question. When Zhou Enlai of the Chinese Communist Party was asked to give his assessment of the legacy of the French Revolution he said "It is too early to say." It is the same with the prefabs.