There is a solitary grandeur about a cluster of prefabs marooned on the edge of a stony hearted city. Not that prefabs are natural loners. Like buffalos they prefer to hang together in herds. This gives them with a sense of defensive security against a condescending and sometimes threatening world.
While prefab design has much to commend it there is one critical flaw. Their walls are far too thin-skinned. This makes prefabs too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. (As our goldfish - frozen solid in its bowl last December - would tell you if it could.) The prefabs' critical Achilles' heel is a lack of thickness. "The same cannot be said of prefab residents" as our enemies always say.
If someone is visiting someone who lives in a prefab (yes, such a thing does happen!) and is in need of directions there is no point in stopping someone and asking the way to "twenty four Newtin Road." A baffled stare wil be the only response. But ask to be directed to "The Prefabs" and there will be no problems at all. The slick salesman who lives in the immaculate prefab on the corner of Woodhedge Road used to take offence when people referred to him as living in The Prefabs. "My abode is forty-six Woodhedge Road, not The Prefabs!" would be his crisp response. Today he has come to terms with his fate and wears his Prefabs designation with pride. "Just as one has 'The British Empire', 'The Establishment', 'The Royal Navy and 'The Reform Club', so one has 'The Prefabs'."
Officials in Town Halls assigned with the delicate task of the Naming Of Names have to steer a perilous course between the Scylla of elevation and the Charybdis of ridicule. Neither Cheyney Mews or Dust Cart Alley would fit the bill as as the address for a row of prefabs. Middle of the road neutrality is the obvious course, and this explains why most all prefabs are located in Roads. In fact roads are right up prefabs' streets. Show me a row of prefabs in the Royal Crescent and I will show you a coalhouse with a diamond-studded roof! Or as the Naming Of Names official from the Guildhall told a Bath & Wilting reporter "If we gave one prefab a bourgeois appellation they will all want one!" Devalue the currency of language and the world would be turned upside down!
Not far from our prefabs and camouflaged behind a cluster of trees is a home for ladies who cannot speak or hear. Tag along with Ronnie Rogers' mum when she does her cleaning job there and you will go into a large room with a high ceiling and a circle of chairs. This is where the residents spend their days. From time to time some of them can stand it no longer and they
will race out into the garden in a flood of tears. Come And Cheer Us Up House should be made the home's new name.

When the dust of the post-war settlement had settled the residents of our estate started going their separate ways. In the run-up to Prefab Demolition Day mouldy drawers had to be prised out of mouldy drawers; bath tubs and flat irons lifted on to the scrap metal merchant's van; rolls of frayed black and white squared lino bundled up in canvas bags; and the priceless paintings by Turner, Rembrandt and Canaletto sent off for secure storage. (Just kidding on that last one).
The demolition of Henry Fielding's fine house left a legacy of civic guilt in its wake, and it was agreed that a prefab should be preserved for posterity and housed in a Museum Of Lost Memory. On the day of its official opening Messrs Oblivion and Void (Curators-In-Chief) gave welcoming speeches to the invited guests. Past residents of Woodhedge and Newtin Roads were there (all sat in the museum's balconies and wearing the fashions of yester-year) plus such iconic figures as Sir Isaac Pitman, Sir Isaac Silk-Farr, Mortimer Wheeler, Mayor Ray Rosewarn, Venanzio Rauzzini (what a voice!), Yehudi Menuhin, J.A. Roebuck (radical firebrand), Peter Panton (scholar and the stonemason), Angela Carter (who we had last been seen leaving the Bell Inn in Walcot Street with a surreal gothic pint of beer in her hand.) As the guests assembled Alberto Semprini played on the piano. The Bath-born maestro's Semprini Serenades were broadcast on the Light Programme for twenty five years from 1957 on. As soon as it was switched on 'Tubby' Lard would cry out: "The tedium! The tedium!" or - following Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) "The horror! The horror!" Of course this was all an act: in truth 'Tubby' really loved his Semprini. When The Last Surviving Twiverton Prefab was unveiled (how I gasped when I realised it was prefab number twenty-four!) - the inspired jazz musician from The Bell Inn gave out a final blast on his trumpet. The Museum of Lost Memory is really worth a visit. Unfortunately no one can remember where it is. The elusive presence of the prefabs is still felt today. It tugs away at their former residents' thoughts, peers over shoulders, brushes against coat sleeves, queries acts of bad faith, leaves a scented hint of consolation in the crevices of lonely evenings, and provides balm and solace for those who find themselves adrift in more evasive times.

Everyone know that Prefab Demolition Day will be highly charged. No, residents on the estate will not have to pay money to watch their prefabs being bulldozed into the ground and smashed into pulp. Prefab Demolition Day is going to be highly charged in the currency of raw tension, see-sawing emotion, and heart-wrenching bathos.
Knocking the estate down will be the biggest event to take place here since - well, since it first went up. There are rumours that a coachload of German and Italian prisoners-of-war who helped put the prefabs up will be coming over. When we watch the steel frames, plaster-board lining, and asbestos cladding being pummelled into dust there will hardly be a single wrinkled cheek which will stay dry. (And some people will cry as well.)
In some parts of the country prefab residents organized hunger strikes in a valiant bid to prevent their homes being torn down. Thre is no way this will happen here. Just a few hundred yards up the road are the de luxe homes - real council houses - that prefab residents will be moving into. "I feel like one of those consultants who Aneurin Bevan bought off when he set up the National Health Service" said Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one. "My mouth has been stuffed with gold!" No one should have any illusions about banner-waving delegations being about to march off to the Guildhall to plead for a last minute reprieve. If a 'Prefab Demolition Day Is Off!' headline was to be splashed across the front page of the Bath & Wilting the sound of teeth being gnashed and cloth being torn would be quite terrifying.
There are still a few nostalgicians around who will shed a tear when they shut their prefab doors for the last time. But history has moved into a different gear. Chrome-lined milkbars, bumper-sized jukeboxes, Formica table tops, and Italian winkle-pickers are setting a different tone. Most prefab dwellers want to grasp hold of the shiny keys of non-prefabricated citizenship - and grasp hold of them now!

In its heyday the Italian Villa that was Silk-Farr House had well-manicured lawns, delightful flower beds, a boating lake, a tropical glasshouse, a tennis court, a splendid water fall, and even a hermitage with a paid recluse. (After sneaking out of the grounds for an unreclusive pint in the My Full Moon the recluse decided never to return.) In the 1930s Sir Isaac Silk-Farr organised children's fetes in the grounds and rough-hewn villagers and smooth-tongued scions of the Somerset gentry played croquet together in an idyll of late Edwardian-style convivality!
The grounds of Silk-Farr House were initially laid out in geometrical form. This was replaced by the 'natural' style of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, which in turn gave way to a wild romantic 'picturesque' look. 'Mona Lot' from number sixty-nine Woodhedge Road (it turned out that there was no number sixty-nine in Woodhedge Road) wrote a stinging letter to the Bath & Wilting. It said "the time had come to talk truth to power" and ended with the ringing line: "For Farr-Silk's Sake make your mind up, Sir Isaac! The grounds of your Italian Villa cannot be symmetrical and natural and 'picturesque' within the space of two decades!"
In its twilight years Silk-Farr House hit on hard times. Even in its hey-day the much trumpeted
warm-air heating system had never been all that efficient (especially in the servants' rooms) and even Miss Silk-Farr's own quarters were said to be "as cold as a prefab kitchen on a February morning in 1947." The gas lamps on the gravel drive glowed ever fainter, and the residents of the neighbouring prefab estate had a sense of an evening coming in which would light none of the Italian Villa's once glittering lights. Locked away in the vaults of Bath's Victoria Art Gallery is a painting called The Lady Of The Italian Villa by an artist whose nom de brush was 'The Tristan Tzara of Twiverton'. It shows the much talked about scene of Miss Silk-Farr stumbling across the prostrate form of her Firewood-Chopper-In-Chief. On his very first chopping day he had been sent into a deep sleep by the scent of the mystical mushrooms which grow so luxuriantly in the turrets of Brunel's railway tunnel. His dreams were filled with images of starlit nights and Harvest moons, of jugs of winking mead and tales of those who had died too young. Miss Silk-Farr is wearing her purple dress (how Twiverton women love purple!) and she reaches down to cool the firewood chopper's sweat-laden brow with her silken hankerchief and rescue him from his journey into the ancient settlement's troubled past.

The more refined and genteel prefabs on our estate tended to be furthest away from the ever merry My Full Moon public house and closest to the iron fence which bordered the grounds of Twiverton's finest - and Twiverton's only - Italian Villa. In the Victorian era Silk-Farr House (as Silk-Farr House was otherwise known) was a citadel of power-broking, political intrigue and financial wheeler-dealing. (Cinema goers should be under no illusions that the forthcoming Hollywood blockbuster The Mysterious Lady Who Lived In The Italian Villa strays a considerable way from the historical truth.) In the 1880s anyone unfortunate enough to make a faux-pas at one of the Italian Villa's famous masked balls would have their dreams of high office crash down in ruins. (As the descendants of the notorious Sir Roger Sliley (Bart.) know all too well.)
In its twilight early 1960s' days the ever enigmatic Miss Silk-Farr kept up the family's tradition of public-spirited philanthrophic endeavour by making an annual visit to the local junior school (built in 1952 on land her family had donated to the community) in order to present books and gold leafed certificates and inspire bright-eyed pupils with a hunger for glittering prizes.
During the 1914-18 war the mills owned by the Silk-Farr produced fabrics for British Army uniforms. With the end of part two of the horrendous European Wars in 1945 the Silk-Farrs used their famous west wing to house an archive of historical research. (However plans to have the words "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" engraved on its ceiling had to be abandoned following a crisis in funding.) Anderson Perry - a patrician Ulster aristocrat who is still rembered for his editorship of the Soho-based journal Theory Is Good For You spent a six month sabbatical beavering away in the archives of Silk-Farr House. His pathbreaking analysis of Labourist submission to the hegemony of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie - and of how these two social formations fused together to form a new power bloc in 19th century Britain - could even have been formulated here. (Painstaking empirical research by the renowned Bath historian R.S. Neale - who left Bath Technical College in 1964 to take up a chair in economic history at the University of New England - had reached the same conclusion a few months before AP published his findings in Theory Is Good For You.)
At their plutocratic peak the Silk-Farrs owned a woollen mill, a quarry, a coal mine, a limeworks, and acres of prime Somerset farmland. In the classic work The Rise and Fall of a Twiverton Dynasty a forensic investigation is made of the somewhat murky origins of the Silk-Farr wealth. The spurious claim that its portfolio included the very same slave plantation in Antigua so fleetingly mentioned in Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park is shown to be quite groundless. The original source of the Silk-Farr's capital (or 'equity' as the discrete bourgeoisie prefer to call it) was wool and specifically the "sheep ate men" fields of the county of Cumberland. As for the mythology that is peddled to this day by the pamphleteers of Glastonbury - that the lineage of the Silk-Farrs can be traced directly back to Merlin the Wizard and King Arthur - this is nailed once and for all.
Too many brows have been furrowed by the final sentence of The Rise and Fall of a Twiverton Dynasty. This is a quotation from Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) - one of Marx's favourite authors - but with a question mark added in golden print. So instead of "Behind every fortune lies a great crime" the book's final sentence reads:

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime?"

Why the question mark is what everyone asks. The book's anonymous authors (who now describe themselves as "post-Marxists") have now made everything clear. The adding of the golden printed question mark symbolised a critique of their former ideological stance. It was an acknowledgement of the entrepreneurial flair, the enduring sense of civic responsibility and the personal integrity displayed by the Silk-Farrs during those long Twiverton years. (The Silk-Farrs' company went bankrupt in 1954 and their beloved Italian Villa was demolished in 1963.) Here was a family of property whose legacy went far beyond property to touch people's hearts for generations to come. In these more tawdry times The Prefab Files rise to salute them.

It was in the summer of 1955 that the dynamic Londoner arrived on the prefab estate. Within days of his moving in he had bulldozed his entire back garden away to make space for a garage. He didn't yet have a car, but everyone said "what a garage!" No one had ever had a grage on the prefab estate before. The Londoner would fire off surly, agitated glances at any yokels who crossed his path. Given half the chance he would have bulldozed half of Twiverton away .
The dynamic Londoner took an instant dislike to Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one. Dai was the yang to the dynamic Londoner's ying. If Dai had had a garage he would have filled it with his books and cuttings from newspapers. All the years of wild scribbling and submitting manuscripts to editors and publishers had got Dai nowhere, and it was just as well he had not given up his day job as a security guard at Isaac Pitman's printing press on the Lower Bristol Road. Dai seemed set to become one of Thomas Grey's "mute inglorious Miltons" who lie buried and forgotten in country churchyards. People said he was like Bath City's full-back Tony Book who languished for years in non-league football in the Southern League.
Yet just as Tony Book was rescued when Malcolm Allison was appointed manager of Bath City,
so Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic was rescued - at least partially - by the enigmatic Miss Silk-Farr who lived in the exquisite Italian villa. Her launching in 1958 of the Twiverton Literary Supplement (or the TLS as it is more widely known) lifted Dai (whose pen name was the "Welsh Hegelian") out of prefab obscurity. Ever since then he has been gathering up small chippings from the statue of fame. "What AJP Taylor did for Dylan Thomas, and Lord Beaverbrook did for Michael Foot, so Miss Silk-Farr will do for Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic!" This is what they started saying in the My Full Moon - and how wrong they were (at least so far.) But if Dai's collected essays are ever published he could still have the last word.
People are always asking how Dai Lectic came to acquire his 'Tolstoy' middle name. This was a result of the very first column he wrote for the TLS back in May 1958. It was a rambling discussion of the politics of inequality. Dai began by quoting Emile Durkheim on the idea of socialism being less a theory than "a cry of pain." This was followed by a structuralist analysis of 'accidents': "can it be accidental that most 'accidents' strike those who occupy the lower foothills of the social structure?" But it was Dai's final paragraph on Leo Tolstoy's aside about misery and happiness which struck a chord with the readers and led to him acquiring 'Tolstoy' as a new middle name. Happiness seems to possess the same radiant quality in all times and places, but misery comes in different shapes and forms.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910): "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic: (1917 - ): "And all happy prefabs resemble each other, and each unhappy prefab is unhappy in its own way." (From the TLS, May 1958.)

The slick salesman who lives in the corner prefab on Woodhedge Road was always in pole position in the race for top prestige position on the estate. This financial colossus did not just have a telephone. He had a Ford Popular car and a television set as well (which made it the estate's one and only 'triple crown'!) A squad of post office engineers was sent to put up a telephone pole up just for his prefab. This made it 'pole' position twice over.
Everyone expected the son of the slick salesman to sail through the eleven plus examination and win a scholastic 'gold' (a place at the grammar school.) And sail through the eleven plus he did. Our own platoon on the estate won two 'golds', two 'silvers' (places at the technical school), and six 'bronzes' (places at the secondary modern schools.) "Both the prefabs and Britain always punch above their weight!" said the slick salesman's son to Stan Malcolm from Camelot Green. (From then on Stan, who goes to school which is 'approved', would call him an "Irredeemably elitest swine!")
When the time came for us to leave what the slick salesman's son called "the gemeinschaft world of our small primary school" for "the gesellschaft world of the big secondary school" it was like moving from a classless utopia into a quasi-fascist state. Friendships were broken up, and former pals like Len Flanders started to hurl bitter canards at his ex-buddies who sported blazers from the technical and grammar school. "You lot think see yourseves as being oh so superior to us sec. mod. types!" When his schooling was completed Len pinned his certificate of secondary education (CSE) up on his bedroom wall (he called it "the poor man's consolation prize") and plotted revenge. Soon he found a lucratve niche in the building supply industry. It was his determination to prove the mentally challenged inventors of eleven plus IQ classifications wrong which gave him an unrelenting hunger to succeed. He did not hang around his old residence in Shores Way for long. (Which is just as well as the houses in Shores Way have weak foundations and are built on top of a disused coalmine. The residents have yet to be told.)
The slick salesman's son was all for grammar schools. "How on earth am I going to escape from the prefabs without them!" he would say. "It would be a comprehensive disaster" if everyone went to the same type of secondary school. "Standards would collapse, pupils like the low-achieving Swileys would rule the roost, and civilization and culture in the Matthew Arnold sense would go to the dogs! That is why I am apprehensive about the comprehensive!" No wonder the picture above the mantelpiece in the slick salesman's prefab was that of Matthew Arnold.

Matthew Arnold (1822-88) on culture:
"the best which has been thought and said."

In 1959 the Bath & Wilting sent one of its junior reporters, an eager-beaver called Rees-Mogg, to find out how many kids on our prefab estate attended fee-paying schools. His article - "No prefab kids at Harrow, they prefer schools which are 'approved'", provoked a barrage of angry responses (Oddly enough they were mainly from people called Waugh.) The phrase "self-pitying hogwash!" was used by a Mr A. Waugh (Junior.) Mr E. Waugh (Senior) declared that prefab estates like ours "were awash with bursaries and scholarships to our top public schools. I have been told on good authority that the upper-sixth at Winchester is absolutely infested with the children of prefab-dwellers from Twiverton!"
'Ossie' from prefab number seventeen was beaten uo in Bath city centre just because he was wearing a (borrowed) Bath Technical College scarf. Who knows what these thugs would have done do he had been wearing a Clifton College scarf. Len Flanders might moan about his time at East Hill sec.mod. but at least he was given some driving lessons there. Those of us who were sent to Weymouth House Technical School (1873-1973) had to put up with having creepy woodwork lessons from a knuckle-dustered teddy boy!

From 1944 on large sums of treasure were spent by the Mighty State Machine to put prefabs up. Two decades later large sums of treasure were spent by the Mighty State Machine to
knock prefabs down. The old philosophy made famous by Tudor Walters ('ensure that public housing is of a high quality') was nudged to one side by the philosophy of Tudor T. Block ('just ensure that public housing is high'.)
Those who first moved into the new tower blocks were typically bricklayers, bus drivers, panel beaters, shop assistants and the like. Human capital of this type has low investment costs and is thus easily replaceable if the blocks come crashing down in the Ronan Point style of 1968. Followers of Le Corbusier (or Charles-Edouard Jeanneret as Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic always called him) had nothing in principle against ground-hugging prefabs. They just wanted to have them lifted high into the sky. This would enable their cloud-hugging residents to give "not waving but drowning" waves to the pilots of aeroplanes who zoomed by their kitchen windows.
A financial spur to the 'Corbusier/Jeanneret hoist prefabs skywards' movement was provided by the 1956 Housing Subsidy Act. If public housing went up four floors the local authority was given £20 for each flat. If it went up another two floors this largesse was almost doubled. The low-density/one-storey 1940s' prefabs with their front and back gardens buttered none of T. Dan Smith's planning committee parsnips and earned zilch fees for John Poulson's architect and consultancy firm. So it was little wonder that prefabs were soon trembling in their low-slung boots. "So this is how the Russian aristocracy felt in 1917" said a mellow Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic in prefab number one. The lateral thinkers in the 'Home Counties' (as if every county is not a 'home' county to those who live in it) had won game, set and match. Their case against housing the masses in low-density housing on acres of expensive land won the day. Just as cloud-touching high tech flats went up the little prefabs with their little gardens were coming down.

In the early 1950s a school in Twiverton won national renown for its expertise in the mathematics of 'positive negatives'. When one of its teachers 'found' that something had 'gone' the fleshy and non-fleshy crevices of the school's pupils would be subjected to a rigorous inspection. What those in charge of these rigorous inspections failed to realise was that the Evil Coin Stealers who wreaked such havoc in this Twiverton school soon developed an uncanny sense of when crevices were about to be inspected. They would then artfully slip the stolen coin
into the unsuspecting pockets of one of the more naive pupils in their class. And a pupil whose pockets were more naive than most was 'Tubby' Lard.
Those who were imprisoned in the Soviet Union at this time (circa.1952) and who for reasons unknown wanted to escape from their socialist paradise would endeavour to find a "cow" to accompany them on their journey. A "cow" was the name they gave to some naive unsuspecting person invited to join them on their bid for freedom. Having a "cow" in the wastes of Siberia was the smart thing to do. It meant that when those fleeing the Gulag ran out of food they could always eat their "cow."
The prefab of forty-five Woodhedge Road in which 'Tubby' Lard lived had a famously well-stocked larder. This meant that 'Tubby' fitted the "cow" mode to a cue. In a very real sense 'Tubby' Lard was wasted on our prefab estate. Here was someone who was tailor-made for the wastes of Siberia.
One day when a coin became a 'positive negative' - when it was 'found' to have 'gone' -an Evil Coin Stealer became an Evil Coin Planter and deftly placed a bright shining coin inside the snug and unsuspecting pocket of 'Tubby' Lard. This was done just seconds before the rigorous inspection of pupils' crevices took place. Minutes later the ashen-white resident of prefab number forty-five had been intimidated into making a "I am in the pay of Leon Trotsky and the British Secret Service" confession. 'Tubby' was ordered to spend the rest of the day staring at the blank neo-Siberian expanse of the creamy white classroom wall. Staring at this creamy white Siberian-like expanse was the favoured way of making pupils ponder on their misdeeds and repent their sins. In 'Tubby' Lard's case this caused even more mental turmoil. Thi was because
'Tubby' - being well meaning 'Tubby' - had next to no sins to confess. At least he was able to
console himself with the thought that - unlike his fellow-feeling 'cows' walking through the wastes of Siberia - no one was about to eat him.
In the valleys of South Wales in the 1920s it was often said that "Experience is a hard school". By the time the pupils of the school were being ushered into the hall to be given the sad news about the death of King George VI 'Tubby' had begun to recognise the wisdome of these words. As he stood to attention during the minute's silence the idetity of both the Evil Coin Stealer and the Evil Coin Planter (they were one and the same) became clear. The warning words of William Blake (1757-1827) then rang through his mind:

"When a sinister person means to be your enemy, they always start by trying to become your friend."

What is special about prefab design is its knack of stretching minimalism to new heights. There is no space for clutter in a prefab. As a model for uncluttered living prefab life takes some beating.
By not having any stairs minimalism is stretched to new heights. The shock of missing a step as you walk downstairs (which happens once every 2,222 times) is unknown inside prefabs.
(Alan Watkins of the Bath &Wilting once remarked that interviewing the MP for Taunton was
like "walking downstairs and somehow missing the last step. You were uninjured but remained disconcerted".)
"Man falls to death down his prefab stairs!" could only be a headline in Mad magazine. In one of the magazine's "let's look on the bright side of bad news!" issues there was a 'true life' report of how a clock on a motor car dashboard started working again for the first time in twenty-five years! This was after the car had crashed into a lamp post, killing the driver, mowing down three pedestrians, and decapitating a stray dog.
Being stairless does not mean that prefabs have no design glitches. The two steps leading down from the kitchen into the back yard are dangerously steep. Like the psychopath who lives next door they are a disaster waiting to happen. It is not always the case that prefabs have a mellowing effect on frayed nerves - as Adrian Denton (resident of prefab number thirty-six) will tell you. Once he was viciously punched from one end of his front garden to the other - and then hit with a leather belt. This incident took place just a few feet from the window where his old man - a stony-faced bus conductor known as Hawkface - sits watching his neighbours' every move. So why on earth did the coiled-attack machine known as Hawkface not intervene when his own son was being so grievously assaulted in front of his very eyes? Sherlock Holmes would have solved this mystery in a moment. It was Hawkface who was doing the assaulting.
Hawkface only takes on those who are smaller than him. However Hawkface is much smaller than Miss ('Pat' to her friends) Wafer Thin and he would never dare to take her on. Miss Wafer Thin is teacher-in-charge in the small school which is squeezed between the My Full Moon public house and the Saint Michael Is No Angel Church. thee seems little doubt that Miss Wafer Thin was placed on this earth in order to make a philosophical point. Namely that essence (how things really are) is not the same as appearance (how things seem). If one of her pupils was to step out of line Miss Wafer Thin's knobbly elbows and puny fists would be instantly transformed into wild-manic-flailing-windmill-style-beating-machines. So when she overheard the kid from the Blackway Estate who wanted to be a jockey make a derogatory remark about his new step-parents Miss Wafer Thin sprung into action. He was taken on a ten circuit canter around the classroom and made to jump over (oops! that should be 'into') the imaginary fences Miss Wafer Thin's mind's eye had painted up on the classroom walls. (Inspect these same walls even today and you will see the wall indents made by the 'irrational exhuberance' of that carefree 1950s' school day.)
Her work-out exercise completed, and with a healthy red glow now in her cheeks, Miss Wafer Thin would gently calm her shell-shocked pupils down and tell them how good the Germans were at making toys.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870): "In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice."

In the 19th century its High Street was so poorly maintained that Twiverton was known as Twiverton-on-the-Mud. 'Tubby' Lard (a resident of prefab number seven) gave the local citizenry an untimely reminder of this distant horse-manured and dirt-splattered past when he was let home early from school.
'Tubby' had been feeling a shade below par. Despite experiencing a call of nature he felt unable to summon up the formidable degree of courage needed to use the school lavatory. (Rumour had it that one in ten of those who ventured down the unlit stairs into the lavatory in the basement of Twiverton Village Hall was never seen again.) 'Tubby''s cunning plan was to feign illness. It worked and he was told to make his way home. As he passed the 18th century house in which Henry Fielding had once stayed a pent-up internal implosion - a spontanous 'Tom Jones' of untoppable velocity - burst asunder in his lower ramparts. As the glistening half-liquified substance (a "gift for the mother" was how Sigmund Freud described it) slid its luxurious way 'Tubby's left leg he experienced a moment of surpreme abandon and exhilaration. The memory of this frisson-filled taboo-challenging open-air moment would stay with him until his dying day. When the mood of Apollonian exultation finally subsided 'Tubby' grasped the vulnerability of his predicament and felt intense relief that no one had appeared to observe him. There then
followed a poignant mood reminiscent of post-coital melancholy and a brooding sense of the brevity of human existence. (Years later 'Tubby' would discover poems from Ancient Greece which recorded the same emotional turbulence.)
On reaching Marcus Milligan's small-holding - a small-holding which prefab residents always thought of as a large-holding - 'Tubby' noticed that the local branch of the International Situationists had been hard at work. (They were soon to make it big in Brussels and Paris.) The branch's black and gold paint brush had emblazoned a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) on the fence behind the red telephone kiosk. 'Tubby' Lard was taken aback by what he saw. He wondered whether his outrageous 'Tom Jones' outburst in Twiverton High Street had been observed be someone after all.

"A joke is an epitaph on the death of feeling."

Twiverton is not just famous for being "very old". It is also famous for being the place where the 18th century novelist Henry Fielding wrote Tom Jones (1749). The house he once lived in was still standing in the village until 1963.

Henry Fielding (1707-54): "Read in order to live."

The City Fathers could have converted Fielding's house into a visitors' centre to rival that of the Brontes in Haworth. Coachloads of Japanese tourists could have been accommodated in the car park of the nearby football ground. Instead they chose to raze it to the ground and build a retirement home for casino owners from Florida in its place.
The tourist revenue could have funded the very things that Twiverton lacks: an open-air swimming pool, tennis courts, a concert hall, a library, and some well stocked shops. However
Pete O'Clarke's old man (resident of prefab number number twelve) says that a boost in tourism is the very last thing which this place needs. "Just look what it has done to Bath! The place has become a traffic polluted cesspool!" For Pete O'Clarke's old man the beauty of life in forgotten places like Twiverton is that people are forced to rely on their own creative resources. As he told a reporter from the Bath & Wilting: "Being in the sticks promotes self-reliance and the inner cultivation of the self. After doing a course at Bath Technical College some young 'uns want to turn this place into flaming Hampstead! The whole point of The Twiverton Way is that you have to find The Path yourself."
You would never know from watching Pete O'Clarke's old man put on his oil-stained overalls and wriggle under his motor bike and side-car to carry out vital mechanical repairs that he is a leading practitioner of Daoism, the two thousand year old Chinese religion/philosophy renowned for unlocking the secrets of wu wei (action through inaction or effortless effort.) When he spotted some kids trying to move a massive boulder which had fallen into the middle of Pennyquick Brook he told them to leave it well alone. The words he spoke on that day have made a lasting impression on everyone. "Just hang on a moment, lads, and wait. It will only be a matter of time before the force of the water has reduced that massive boulder to a tiny pebble." Such are the fruits of effortless effort!
Pete O'Clarke's old man's decision to build a weightlifting gym in his back yard - the one that was to be the springboard for so many prefab youth joining the legendary Le Club Musculation -was also prompted by Daoist insights. Breath training and cultivation of the martial arts was a central part of the gym's daily routine. "Breathe slowly, sharpen your thinking, move with deliberation, read up on both the philosophy of the East and the West, and soon you will be on course for finding The Way!"

Some people like to make prefabs the butts of cheap jokes, but prefabs themselves are not cheap. When the prefab building programme was launched in 1944 the annual cost was £150 million. A thousand pounds was needed to buy just one prefab!
Leaf through the glossy pages of Prefab World and you will find that some prefabs have walls that are smooth and straight while other prefabs have walls that are wavy and corrugated. Some prefabs have roofs that are flat while others have roofs that slope. Some prefabs have front doors positioned bang in the centre while others have front doors positioned near one of the ends. Some prefab estates are connected by long roads while others are connected by small footpaths. Some estates are mega-complexes with more than two hundred prefabs while others are micro-clusters with less than forty. What a lush variety of forms are denoted by the 'prefab' word! The universe has just eleven dimensions while in Britain alone there are thirteen different prefab types. If you were lucky enough to win a short break in a prefab you could find yourself padding around anything from a Hamish (type 1 or type 2), a Duplex Sheath, a Bricket Wood Special, a Blackburn Orlit to a Foamed Slag!
Prefab evolution has largely followed the Darwinian principle of 'survival of the flattest'. Continued turbulence in the atmosphere means that the 'AIROH Aluminium Bungalows' on our estate (AIROH is an acronym for 'Aircraft Industries Research Organisation in Housing') are getting a little bit flatter every day. A banner now links Newtin and Woodhedge Roads which proclaims "We Are Proud Of Our AIROHs!" Brass nameplates engraved with the words Airoh House Residence are making dazzling one up-manship appearances on front doors. Plans are afoot to explore different facets of our prefab world and holiday exchanges are being arranged with those who reside in Spooner, Universal, and Uni-Seco prefabs. After all:

"What do they know of prefabs who only one prefab knows?"

Until very recently the itinerary of Twiverton's 'Roaming City Coach Company' was confined to the usual suspects - to places like Cheddar Gorges, Spooky Hole, Weston-Super-Mud, the Minehole Holiday Camp, and the Lion Tamer's House at Leatlong. However people now hanker for wider horizons. In the Summer after next there will be guided tours to the Tarrans prefabs of Hull, the Phoenixs of Bristol, and the Arcons of Newport! The Bath & Wilting says our estate is poised to pip the Georgian city of Bath at the post and win the UNESCO World Heritage Site
status it so richly deserves.

It is not accurate to claim - as many do - that "all prefabs look the same." Take the ones on our own estate. (This is a cue for 'no one else will!') Although every prefab has been made to the same standard specifications, each one cultivates its own very distinctive persona. Some prefabs remain in a smooth, pristine blotch-less condition for years on end and manage to retain the fresh-faced vitality of their earliest days. Thee have gilded paths which are gently caressed by the sweet scent of roses. Others begin to give off a pungent body odour within days of their being constructed and quickly become pockmarked with all kinds of odd and oily looking substances. Stains of a most suspicious kind are streaked across their rusting lower firmaments, and stray hounds on the look out for hospitable terrains feel compelled to anoint them at regular intervals.
One of the prefabs which has had more stray hound dog visits than most is prefab number twenty-five. Its first residents enjoyed climbing in through their next door neighbour's kitchen window and hurling plates and cutlery into the back garden. There was sweet relief all round when they moved to Bristol when the eldest son was signed up as a goalkeeper by the Black Arabs football club. The sweet relief was not to last for long. It dissipated the moment the new residents were seen moving in. The new residents were the Swileys!
Reviewers in the Sunday supplements and the literary press have to date not said a single harsh word about The Prefab Files. (This is not too surprising given that they are oblivious to its existence.) However it is not hard to imagine what their criticisms would be. "The Prefab Files are saturated with archaic nostalgia and soft-lensed romanticism. They have the gall to ooze a paste of pseudo-magical realism on to the dull, tedious repressed life of a 1950s' prefab estate in a parochial Somerset outpost and portray it as some kind of lost Golden Age!" This might well be true if we had said nothing in The Files about the Swileys. Yet evade the Swileys we have not. We have confronted their presence head-on. And we have recognised that ours was not the only prefab estate in the country which had its Swileys!

Benny Hills - our "fastest in the west" milkman - is something of a legend. He does not just deliver milk to the fifty households on our estate - he delivers philosophy as well. "Are you going to stay with Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ?" (1921) he said to Ernie Flynn's mum at prefab number fifteen - "or is it time to switch to the less opaque and creamy Blue Book (1933)?"
You can always tell when Benny has been burning the midnight oil with The Critique of Pure Reason (1781). What a racket his milk bottles make! The strain of combining milk delivery with logical positivism really got to him one Monday morning. He was seen gripping hold of the lapels of Swiley's jacket at prefab number twenty-five and shouting: "For pity's sake man, what exactly do you mean when you say you want a pint of milk? If you don't start defining your terms and making your assumptions explicit you will be getting buggar all!" It was not for the cooling David Hume ointment he periodically rubs into his forehead and various sensitive empirical parts his entire world-view would have been made redundant years ago.
As well as being adept at detecting new trends in philosophy the prefabs' milkman is something of an authority on new movements in architecture as well. On his very first round here he was singing the praises of "the noble Euclidian simplicity of the rectangular prefab." Nowadays he tells everyone that its straight-lined days are numbered. He tells us that on the other side of the Atlantic R. Buckminster Fuller is poised to persuade the Beech Aircraft Company to produce prefabs which are dome-shaped and circular. He has seen the future and it is circular!

R.Buckminster Fuller: "Man knows so much and does so little."

Leaf through the pages of the Burlington Magazine of Connoisseurs (the most coveted publication on our estate) and you can soon realise that the circling of the rectangle has become The Big Architectural Question Of The Day. To quote from the last editorial: "The conventional rectangular prefab is losing its classic chic look - as any visitors to Twiverton will know." According to the followers of Buckminster Fuller the domed shaped prefab will lead to its demise." Neither Big Band Glenn Miller music or rectangular prefabs can stay fashionable for ever.

A shed is a building, a cathedral is architecture, but a prefab is design!"

Between 1945 and 1949 around 160,000 rectangular prefabs were assembled into place. At the peak of the Great Prefab Boom a new one was going up every twelve minutes! It has to be acknowledged that the kudos of renting a prefab went to some people's heads. Some residents saw themselves as a kind of reserve aristocracy in waiting. (The size of the British aristocracy at this time - 157,000 households - was about the same as the prefab population.) So if the Duke and Duchess of Somerset keeled over the Bollards at prefab number four would be ready to take their place. A sense of being one of the elect stayed with prefab dwellers until the end.
The reputation of Aneurin Bevan (Member of Parliament for Tredegar/Ebbw Vale from 1929 to 1960) plummeted when - in a speech launching the National Health Service in 1948 -he
described the Tories as "lower than vermin." An even greater blow to his reputation came when after he described prefabs as "chicken huts" and "rabbit hutches." The author of In Place Of Fear (1952) seemed to have little inking that the prefabs had come In Place Of Fear. Perhaps Bevan simply wanted prefabs to be bigger and of a higher quality, but his words acted as a blow to prefab dwellers' amour-propre.
When Admiralty civil servants were moved from London to Bath it was on the strict Bevanite understanding that none of them would end up having to live in a prefab. A reporter from the Bath & Wilting discovered that a number of them were renting out the houses they owned in London at the same time as they were renting spacious council houses in Twiverton. He was told that on no account should this be made public. (How many dark secrets have been kept by the Bath & Wiltings of Britains's local press!)
Harold Wilson, a future Labour Prime Minister, said he had given up reading Das Kapital (1867) after finishing finishing the first chapter. At least he would have read the book's preface which tells readers there is no "royal road" to science. And there is no "royal road" to understanding the Zen Of Prefab Life. Hundreds of evenings have to be spent staring into the embers of the coal fire and watching reflected slivers of moonlight flicker dance on the sitting-room wall before one gains an appreciation of the spiritually expansive nature of these pale and compact architectural forms. The weight of Bevan's workload and the unrelenting attacks to which he was subjected meant that this truth remained hidden from him.
Another pity of those times is that George Orwell never got round to writing The Great Prefab Novel. What a mistake he made in spending his final days in the bleak winter of 1950 marooned in an isolated cottage on the windswept Scottish island of Jura. If only he had been recuperating his health on our prefab estate in Twiverton and mulling things over in the comfort of the My Full Moon. Yet there is a forgotten prefab dimension to Orwell's last book (published in 1949). The message of 1984 is just how impoverished life would be if the small pockets of freedom symbolised by prefabs were to vanish away.

Prefabs only went up because other houses had gone down. Between July 1940 and March 1945 half a million homes were flattened and a quarter of a million badly damaged. Twiverton got off quite lightly during the war (not that the twenty-seven Twivertonians some of the bombs landed on would agree.) The Railway Inn and the parochial school were annihiliated, but no one was inside them at the time.
A prime target for Adolf Schicklgruber's bombers was the major port and industrial centre which lies ten miles to the west of Twiverton. Over fourteen hundred people died during the Bristol Blitz. Bath's turn came during the Baedecker raids on historic cities. This was 'revenge' for the RAF's bombing of Lubeck on the 28th and 29th March 1942. The bombing of Bath on April 25th and 26th 1942 left four hundred and seventeen people dead. Schicklgruber's bombers had a clear run as the pilots at near-by RAF Colerne had been sent away on week-end leave!
'Ozzie' Oster's mum was in Bristol when it was being blitzed. Some of the pilots who were dropping bombs on her could have been from her home town of Koblenz. Some of her old friends and neighbours would have watched her mother being taken to Koblenz Railway Station and sent off to the Belzec death camp.

"When you've got friends and neighbours, All the world is a happy place." (The Billy Cotton Band song.)

One night 'Ossie's mum felt too tired to make it to the air raid shelter. It received a direct hit, and the couple from next door were killed. Then she moved to Bath and arrived just in time for the bombing there. Fortunately the bombs missed her. But unfortunately the polio germs lingering in her bomb-damaged flat did not.

George Orwell: "As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying
overhead, trying to kill me."

Down our way the term 'the old man' is used to refer to your father. It denotes admiration and not disrespect.
Sinc ethe early 1950s the old man has been working as a furnace bricklayer for a Dutch company with an HQ in Rotterdam called Derro Enamels. His trowel has been taken all over the Continent ("Harwich for the Continent, Frinton for the Incontinent"), and sweat from his brow has fertilised the soil of France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Finland, Yugoslavia, Portugal, Rumania, and Italy. According to his Derro manager Turkey will be the lucky next recipient of dollops of his salt-scented perspiration.
The postcards sent back to the prefab are lined up on the mantelpiece. Most are black and white, but now and again there is one which is in full colour and with curled edges as well. Typical postcard views show villages nestling under mountains or people strolling around splendid city squares. It is clear that the old man has a special liking for ones which show grand buildings such as opera houses and concert halls. When you look at them it is hard to believe that - just a few years ago - this was a continent which was being soaked in the blood of mass slaughter!
The writing on the back of the postcards is always in blue biro and in neat capital letters. On the right-hand side is our address:

24 Newtin Road
Twiverton
Somerset
England/Inghilterra


On the left-hand side will be one of the following phrases. Either "LOVE FROM ME" or "ALL GOES WELL."

'Nuclear Bomb Exploded!', 'Communist Troops Advance In Korea!', 'Nasser Takes Over Suez Canal!, 'Budapest In Flames!', 'No More National Service!' These fragments of history have been sent richocheting around the estate by dozens of black-dialled wireless sets. By the time the Daily Mirror lands on our door-mat (even though it carries the tension-packed Garth cartoon strip) the sense of being on the cutting-edge of history as it is happening has faded away. By the time evening draws in and we are leafing through the Bath & Wilting the edge of excitement has been almost completely blunted away.
Our wireless set is the most draught-free corner of the sitting-room ('the north-west passage'.) This is where we huddle round and listen to nerve-tingling episodes of Take It From Here and the charismatic Eth and Ron (1948 - 1961), to Dick Barton - Special Agent! (people still cannot believe how it was taken off air in 1952), Jet Morgan's Journey Into Space (launched back in 1953), epic football matches such as Wolverhampton Wanderers' 3-2 victory over the Hungarian champions Honved in 1954, and - from 1951 on - (provided you could find the elusive 208 metres wave band) the latest hit-songs from Radio Luxembourg. If the old man is around he will shout "Turn that dirge off!" from his sofa bunk. Unless, that is, the silky charmed voice of 'Horace Batchelor' is slithering down the ether. The words of Horace hold everyone in their spell. In the days before Horace walked on history's stage K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m was a Nondescript Someplace Somewhere Town known only for its chocolate factory (as well as the lewd gnomes on display in its suburban gardens.) That all changed when the inventor of the 'infra-dig' method of winning fortunes on the football pools took Radio Luxembourg listeners by storm. As soon as the K word was spoken (with each of its eight illustrious letters repeated in turn) the spirit of Saint Keyne - founder of the settlement of Keynsham back in the fifth century - begins to emanate out of the swirling mist.
There have always been a few sour and discordant voices who whsper that K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m only left its imprint on the map of world consciousness in order to ensure that tens of thousands of 'Big Pools Win' seeking postal orders safely winged their way into Horace's K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m post office account. Yet Horace was a "most sincerely, folks!" Hughie Green kind of guy who -from 1948 on - (when the secret of the 'infra-dig' method first was first unveiled to an astonished world) - poured out twelve million pounds from out of his own Post Office account and into the coffers of the downtrodden masses. (How much stayed in Horace's own coffers is what air cadets are told to call a "known unknown".)
Today the word 'Batch' has come to be used as a shorthand term for 'Batchelor'. It denotes the musty and rather off-putting odour that batchelors who refrain from washing their bed linen, socks and under-garments are said to reek of. (According to Mr M. Amis members of the 'Batch' fraternity always prefer black to white underpants as they stay cleaner for so much longer.)
The Radio Luxembourg broadcasts of Horace Batch had their downside. it is said they helped promote the deluded myth that a win on the football pools is enough to ensnare the Goddess of Happiness. Yet who could deny that those distant post-war years would have worn a far more sombre look without the K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m incantations of the world famousHorace Batch.

Only a select few have ever had the privilege of seeing the inside of a prefab. Countless numbers regularly troop around palaces and stately homes and country houses, but the viewing of prefab interiors is (like the private quarters of 10 Downing Street) strictly by personal invitation only.
Visitors to our 1950s' prefab would be escorted into the sitting-room. (Socially aspiring types called it the living-room.) You would have seen an African wood carving from Southern Rhodesia; a wooden stool which looked as if it had been taken from van Gogh's room in Arles; an elegant lampstand "Weimar style" according to Pete O'Clarke's old man); an Escalado horse race set (the same horse never won twice in a row); a robot with plasticine eyes made out of Meccano); a jug the old had been given given by the owner of the Albergo Ristorante 'Continental' Bassano Grappo (he said it had been the best place he had ever stayed in); a plastic Airfix model of a lethal Japanese Zero fighter plane; a gyroscope which kept on spinning; a silver bell from a souvenir shop in Brussels; and a music box with a haunting melody which reminded everyone of Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949) film. This aesthetic configuration would have even impressed Erno Goldfinger, the Hungarian architect who was a leading authority on prefab design and was so cruelly maligned in Ian Fleming's James Bond novel.
Even now I feel guilty about the football pitch markings that were scratched on to the once-smooth surface of the sitting-room table. Chiselling away at the secrets of Prefab Land (circa. 1957) has plenty of drawbacks, but it is a big advance on chiselling away at the surface of our
only polished table. The landlord of the Martello Tower Bar says it was a yearning to chisel away at the secrets of Dublin (circa. 1904) that made James Joyce go into exile in Trieste and Paris. He made sure he put a copy of the Dublin street guide into his travel bag. At this very moment someone driven by the same compulsion could be placing a copy of Kelly's Guide to Bath into their travel bag. Without a street map and a spell of exile it is impossible to make sense of the life you have left behind.

Our prefab is in Twiverton. Go back twenty life spans ago and it was the Rman colony of Twivertonium. A sense of antiquity pervades every nook and cranny. Hardly a month goes by without someone digging up a Roman coffin in their back garden!
In Nicolaus Pevsner's guide to 'North Somerset and Bristol' no less than one third of a page is devoted just to Twiverton! (Admittedly this falls short of the forty-eight pages on Bath, but as Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one points out "it was quite impossible for Pevsner to miss us out." The one third of a page gives special mentions to the suspension bridge (1837) and the "gloomy-looking" jail (1843).
In Anglo-Saxon times Twiverton was known as Weir Town, and even today you can hear some people using this name. (Although they make the mistake of calling it Weird Town.) Twiverton's assets were sizeable enough to gain a mention in the Doomsday Book. Since then its name has changed a number of times. It has been known as 'Two-ford-town' (which is what 'Twiverton' originally means) and in 1876 it was officially re-named 'Twiverton-on-Avon'. The slick salesman
in the corner prefab sees this as a great missed opportunity. "If only it had been re-named 'Twiverton-upon-Avon' we would be up there with Stratford-upon-Avon and Kingston-upon-Hull."
However adding the word 'Avon' on to Twiverton was not motivated by anything as sordid and shallow as social climbing. It was a desperate last-ditch attempt to stop letters being sent by mistake to Tiverton in Devon. This is something which continues to this day.

Send us our letters back, you pillaging piratical Devonian Tivertonians!

Twiverton is global or it is nothing, and it was at the cutting edge of the industrial revolution. This was where - in 1792 - 'Blue Dye' Bamford and Cooke's opened up their famous mill. The tag of 'Blue Dye' was a result of the blue stains the mill workers ended up being covered with. At least they had jobs to go to. The mill destroyed the livelihoods of the home-based weavers and this left a legacy of political radicalism which survives (in a ghostly form) to this day. While labour historians continue to honour places like 'Red Maerdy/Little Moscow', Chopwell and the Vale of Leven, few of them make reference to 'Tenacious Twiverton'. And it was from 'Tenacious Twiverton' that in 1839 a heavy squad was dispatched to Weston village in support of a Chartist 'votes for the workers!' rally. (Or a 'votes for workers of the male gender' rally.) Even today, members of the Global Ruling Class will turn pale and their hands tremble at the mention of the sans culottes of Twiverton!
In 1840 Twiverton village was sliced open by the building of the Great Western Railway. Train passengers started to glimpse just how bad things were here. Food collections were soon being organised by churches in Bath, and there were times in the 'hungry forties' when it was touch and go whether Twiverton would pull through.
TAOTG (The Age Of Technological Genocide) could yet wipe our species out for good. Three years before a bullet in Sarajavo officially launched the start of TAOTG Mr Edward Hutton had his book published. It was called Highways and Byways in Somerset (1911). This book has never been on sale in any bookshop in Twiverton. This is not simply beacuse there have never been any bookshiops in Twiverton. It is because Edward Hutton's book included the following infamous line: "Twiverton is not to be altogether despised, for it is very old."
Once upon a time residents who lived in grand houses in Georgian crescents and squares would purse their lips and adopt a sniffy tone of voice if the word 'Twiverton' came up in conversation. (Nowadays they ensure it never does.)
In 1805 Jane Austen went on what she called a "pleasant walk" to Twiverton.
Being "a good egg" (a favourite term of the old man) she did not mention despising anything.

Having no upstairs (this is the cue for "in more ways than one") gives prefab residents their well-grounded sense of self and identity. Originally these pale constructions were expected to last for ten years at most. This faint hearted deadline was passed yonks ago! The quality of prefab design means that they could be standing tall (well, in a manner of speaking) for ten times that long. All that is needed are a few reinforcements for their walls and roofs and a decent heating system.
Not that you are going to hear any bragging about the famed longevity of prefabs just at the moment. The authorities have offered us the chance of moving into real council houses with upstairs lavatories! No wonder everyone has suddenly gone stum. It took about three nano-seconds to look this gift horse in the mouth. Now worn-out pieces of lino and the finest Formica tables are being heaped on to a giant bonfire. Scrap metal merchants just have to shout out "Any" (without adding "old irons!") before they are overwhelmed with largesse.
Of course moving residents out of the prefabs and stripping the landscape of these thin-slivered
pale constructions will be the easy part. Taking the prefabs out of the residents will be a much trickier affair. A yearning to return has been buried deep inside our psyches. One day it will force its way out and explode into the daylight as a forest of glorious sunflowers.
It is not that long ago that the ever-restless 'Ossie' Oster of prefab number seventeen could not wait to get the hell out of this place. He now seems to be having second thoughts. The other night he was heard screaming something out in his sleep. Most of it was unintelligible, but there were some half-remembered words from Gustave Flaubert. Stuff that the scrap metal merchants would appreciate about cracked kettles, beating out tunes for bears to dance to, and longing to move the stars to pity.
"Cheer up, Ossie!" someone said to him the next day when he was looking a bit rough. "After all - when you look at the coming demolition in the broader scheme of things - a prefab is just a heap of asbestos, aluminium, and a few 'any old irons'. And some 'gossamer, feathers, air'."

The "to those that hath shall be given" principle (Matthew 13: 12) is seldom nudged to one side. But this is what happened in the aftermath of the 1939-45 war. People who would otherwise have been left permanently homeless found themselves living in temporary homes. For those who were stuck in dingy basement flats or marooned in ex-army barracks the offer of a key to a prefab was like manna from heaven.
In May 1944 a newly unveiled prefab started to make a public exhibition of itself in the Tate Gallery. Tens of thousands of prefabs were soon being connected to water mains and electricity cables up and down the country. There was even some wild, science fiction-style futuristic talk of having them connected to telephone lines!
Britain's prefabs were fighters from the word go, not least because the aluminium in their walls and roofs had been taken from war planes. Cities which had been bombed the most like Coventry and Hull were given the most prefabs. Not far from the front of the queue for the new prefabs came cities like Bristol and Bath.
The central aim of the 1944 Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act was to provide "a temporary solution to the post-war housing shortage." Not everyone wanted a solution to be found for the post-war housing shortage. After all, while should aluminium be wated on plebs and peasants at a time when country houses had leaks in their bow wings and crumbling porticos! Building prefab estates instead of restoring country estates was an afront to the enemies of aesthetic vandalism and cultural barbarism. No wonder Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh launched a ferocious counter attack. On March 13 1944 he wrote the following lines to his friend Lady Dorothy Lygon:

"I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich people, beautiful, high born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and these are mainly the demons of sex and drink which after all are easy to bear as troubles go nowadays."

No tears have been brought to anyone's eyes by a beautiful book about prefabs. Here was a 'Brideshead' that was neither visited or revisited or even noticed by the literary elite. No film or television producer would ever demean himself by setting up camp on a prefab estate. No artist of any acclaim would set up an easel here, no composer of music would dream of casting a look in their direction. Prefabs were ignored when they were around and forgotten after they had been
swept away. But here -on a crumbling ledge in a faint margin of memory - a hand is lifted to salute them!

Postscript: Evelyn Waugh's wife managed to get hold of three bananas for their children during the war. ('Yes, we do have some bananas!') Her beautiful high-born husband sat down in front of the children, peeled the bananas, poured cream and sugar on them, and than ate all three. When it came to bringing tears to people's eyes he was in a league of his own.