My father attended the same elementary school in Pentwyn as Roy Jenkins, the prominent Labour Party politician. These two led parallel lives. Both spent some time in 'Oxford'. Roy's 'Oxford' included the university's Bodleian Library, my father's 'Oxford' included the Cowley car factory on the other side of town.
The old man's father made the timber supports which prevented the roofs of the coal mine he worked in from caving in. If his workmanship had not been up to scratch Roy Jenkins' father might have come to grief and the future Home Secretary would never have been born. Miners would lift up their hands from deep inside the bowels of theearth and imagine they could touch flowers on the hillside above.
When he was young Roy Jenkins' father went off to Paris in search of a life of freedom. But his money ran out and he was compelled to return to work dow the mines. He became a union official (and was briefly jailed during the 1926 General Strike), was elected to Parliament. His family was able to employ a maid, and Roy Jenkins junior was sent to school wearing a silk suit. (A big mistake as he had mud thrown at him by the other boys.)
On Sundays the Jenkins family would drive out to a quiet market town for lunch in a smart hotel. Roy began to acquire a liking for claret and a taste for the more sensual side of bourgeois life.
For the old man (but never for Roy Jenkins) public houses were part of the weft and warp of daily life. Pubs functioned as seminar rooms, job centres, accommodation bureaus, and porticos into the abbyss. .
In 1950s Bath I would be sat down on the stairs of a Twiverton inn and wait to have supplies of ginger beer, Cheddar Cheese Straws - and even a pickled egg! - ferried up to my regal throne.

"The ae house is the key to every town" - Walter Benjamin.

'Tubby' Lard (resident of prefab number seven) has been known to wobble in his loyalties. Two years ago he was an unshakeable supporter of Bristol Rovers - "the aesthetics of their blue and white quartered shirts are so captivating!" Then he switched to Bristol City after they had beaten Rovers in the local derby match -"City's Ashton Gate ground does not have any of the horrible gasworks' smells that you always get at Eastville." Then - in the twinkle of any eye - he was seen walking aound showing off his new Bristol Rovers' scarf after the club's sensational
4 - 0 victory over Manchester United in the FA Cup! ("The way the Rovers' supporters sang 'Irene, Goodnight Irene' was so moving!") When challenged to justify this disgraceful turn-coat conduct 'Tubby' had the gall to quote the retort made by Winston Churchill in 1900. Having deserted the Conservative Party for the Liberal Party Churchill then re-joined the Conservative Party. "To rat is one thing" he said,"but to re-rat is something special."
Tony Taverner (known as 'Skirton' to his friends) is the footballing hero of Twiverton. He started off playing in the Somerset Youth League with Whiteway Canaries. After being spotted by a Hereford United he finally hit the big time with Manchester City and Arsenal. Every football album of any quality has a photograph of the ball slipping through the fingers pf the Arsenal goalkeeper in the 1927 F.A. Cup Final. (Cardiff City won the match by a goal to nil.)
No local player has been signed by Gateshead, a club which plays in the Third Division (North). Perhaps it is because prefabs foster a 'support the underdog' complex which explains why a number of us follow the fortunes of this supremely unfashionable club. It was 'Auntie' Ivy's brother, 'Uncle' Stan (who always gives us a wave when he is cutting the grass at the junior school) who first told us about Gateshead F.C. He married a girl from Jarrow, a town which is just up the road from Gateshead. Whenever we saw her she always looked very pale and thin. She had left her home town when it was hit by the depression in the 1930s. Her two children were quite young when she died, and whenever the Gateshead result comes on the wireless we find ourselves thinking of her.

Despite winning nearly a quarter of a million fewer votes than the Labour Party, the Conservative Party triumphed in the general election of 1951. Harold Macmillan was the new Minister of Housing. His aim was to build a record number of houses - and build them he did! In 1954 no less than three hundred and fifty-four thousand new homes went up! Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one got hold a copy of Macmillan's The Middle Way (written in 1938) and recommended it to the old man. The hard-faced Conservatism of the 1930s had taken a back seat.
Go back in your time machine from anty time between the late 1950s and the early 1960s and you would have seen Major Lansdowne - a sad-eyed figure with a droopy Harold Macmillan-style moustache - selling copies of the "Daily Worker!" The Major also believed in The Middle Way - although his was half way between Lenin and Keir Hardie. On Saturday mornings he would snip open his bundle of Daily Workers and get ready for the rush to buy. The amazing thing about Major Lansdown's selling technique was that by the end of the afternoon only one or two copies of the Daily Worker would be left, and yet no one was ever seen buying one. Supporters of the Fourth International sometimes shouted "It's Comrade Rigor Mortis!" and Cyril Connolly once stood in front of him and recited his poem about "classes and masses and masses of asses!" One letter writer to the Bath & Wilting said he disagreed with everything Major Lansdowne stood for but applauded his "indefatigable spirit." He also pointed out that it was a tactical error to stand outside the very building where - until 1954 - the masses had queued with their ration books. "The hidden semiotic message of selling Daily Workers on this spot is that socialism = rationing, which is spot on!"
Most of the shoppers ignored Major Lansdowne completely, but now and again a fierce discussion would break out. Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic said the paper had made a serious mistake by claiming that religion had been described by Marx as "the opium of the masses." "This is a mistranslation. Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses. It dulls the pain of life under capitalism which is what shopping and television does today." In 1963 a group of youthful sellers of the agit-prop newsletter Neither Moscow or Washington but Twiverton! tried to muscle in on the Major's Daily Worker patch, but he would have none of it and with some friendly police assistance ended up winning the day.
After peaking at 102,780 votes in 1945 support for the British Communist Party melted away. The revival in the party's vote in the early sixties - it edged back to 62,112 in 1966 - proved to be a false Morning Star. The spirit of the age was not just turning against Major Lansdowne's party. It was turning against prefabs as well. Prefab estates became niche constructions for the discerning few. Most people wanted to live in Middle Way. Everyone has a car and a patio in Middle Way. No one looks scruffy in Middle Way. You never see anyone like Major Lansdowne in Middle Way!

"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.

Rationing ended in 1954 and the Consumer Society arrived a couple of years later. It arrived when a vending machine was installed in the village. This vending machine did not dispense mouldy old bars of chocolate or packets of Woodbine cigarettes. It dispensed ultra-fresh cartons of strawberry flavoured milk! Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number could not wait to put a coin in it. (He had mistaken it for the vending machines that were to be installed in the streets of Moscow which delivered bottles of vodka wrapped in brown paper bags!)
There was more to the Consumer Society than cartons of strawberry flavoured milk. Hard on the heels of vending machines came bars of white chocolate! (The Swiss had been tucking into this delicacy since the 1930s!) After shoving his way to the front of white chocolate queue 'Bully Boy' Brown of Shores Way was seen puking up in the gutter. ('Bully Boy' Brown's life was to show that sometimes there is a relationship between character and fate.) The pace of change taking place from 1956 on was given another accelerated boost when Bath City football club signed a player from the Continent who had a sun tan, a stylish haircut, and did overhead kicks!
A slick, press-buttoned, Meteor Jet-filled sky of a future was juggernauting and sonic booming its way towards us. It was filled bumper to bumper with a hunger for things, for Formica table tops, three-piece suites, Hoovers, hula-hoops, jukeboxes, electric irons, washing machines, Italian-style suits and winkelpicker shoes. The quiet repose that was prefab estate life would soon be over.