"Putting on the agony. Putting on the style. That is what the young folk are doing all the while." The lyrics of Lonnie Donnegan's hit-song of 1957 might even have been composed in a prefab. Prefab dwellers always knew they had lots of things going for them - gardens, functionality, mod-cons, a relaxed mode of being... But as the years went by they began to feel they were being put on the back foot when it came to style. Style is intrinsically elusive and hard to pin down. During our kerbstone debates some felt it was "a vivid design that no one has thought of before." (This was the view of Ann Brown-Sloane in prefab number forty-eight.) Others (notably Len Sullivan of prefab number thirty-three) believed it was "a novel way of expressing the spirit of the age." Late in the evening 'Tubby' Lard stormed off after coming out with the stinging rebuke that we had become all form and no content and that all the talk about style was "sadly symptomatic of the growing narcissism of our time."
Even 'Tubby' agreed that the new light green 5A buses -the ones which ferried Twivertonians
back and forth into town - had plenty of style. Their style oozed from every oily crevice. The buses' engines hummed with the smooth authority of Daimler cars. Just as people who have problems end up spending their free-time with other people who have problems, so stylish icons of culture end up being drawn to other stylish icons of culture. No stylish Nymph Venuses in blue jeans had ever been seen at the local bus stop waiting for the old 5A bus, but as soon as the first new 5A bus was die to arrive whole squads of them materialised from nowhere. "We just had to give the new bus's soft-padded squelching seats a sensual try!" one of them was heard to say.
The excitement generated by the new buses and blue jeans knocked 'Tubby' Lard off balance. He was determined to show the Nymph Venuses that when it came to operating the 5A bus's magical finger-touch bells he was the quickest in the west. Those accompanying 'tubby' pn his first trip on the new bus had an ominous feeling that he would prematurely eject his finger in a most unstylish way - and prematurely eject he did. The new streamlined light green 5 A bus was brought to a shuddering brake-screeching halt only having just pulled away from the previous bus stop. Jumping the gun was one thing, but this gun was still fast asleep. The brakes were applied with such vigour that one of the Nymph Venuses almost fell out of her soft-padded sensual seat. "I didn't want (cough) to get off the bus (cough) quite yet! (cough)" 'Tubby' whispered to the ferocious looking driver (who seemed poised to prematurely eject 'Tubby' Lard' from his first ride on the stylish new bus.) 'Tubby' sensed that his heinous finger-touching folly was going to be the talk of the bus passengers for the rest of the ride into town. When it
reached the final stop by the Abbey next to the 'Water is best' fountain the harsh leson had been learnt that the arrival of a stylish bus does not mean that a stylish bus driver has arrived as well. Opposites do attract sometimes.
By 1959 more and more prefabs were acquiring a lacklustre look. Their once sharply defined edges had been blunted, water butts were sprouting minor leaks, and the corrugated coalhouses no longer had lost their celebrated honey-hued look. Lawns and hedges were covered with a dew of restlessness, and strangers in grey raincoats were seen taking black-bound notepads from their pockets and jotting down estimates of the prefabs' scrap value.