One of the great advantages about having rows with foreigners is that they are on the defensive from the word go. After all, what are they doing in this country anyway!
Local residents include two Welshmen (who are 'foreigners' by definition since 'Welsh' is Saxon for 'foreigner'), someone from Malta, a refugee from Germany, and a Scottish-Pakistani family who are liked by everyone (bar the Slileys of course.) In a terraced house near the dark railway arch on the Lower Bristol Road lives a lean and tough looking youngish woman who has a crew-cut hair style. She was with the Polish resistance during the war. The Slileys like nothing better than shouting "Go back to your own country!" to a foreigner with a bad leg, but they are as quiet as mice whenever they encounter the wman from the Polish resistance!
Anti-foreigner jibes are very rare on our estate - the prefabs are a repository of civic virtue - but when sulky Len Sullivan (prefab number thirty-three) fell out with "I want to be a taxi driver!" Ernie Flynn (prefab number fifteen) you could sense that something bad was in the air. Len Sullivan had been hit for six by Ernie Flynn in a cricket match on the green. He immediately took his bat home and gave his mum a somewhat doctored account of the indignities he had suffered. There was no way Len Sullivan's mum was going to let a Flynn hit her precious Len for six. Two vitally relevant items of judiciously-weighed evidence were hurled towards prefab number thirty-three. The outrageously illegitimate manner (tantamount some might say to an act of war) in which the indigenous Len Sullivan had been hit for six by the ginger-haired interloper Ernie Flynn was exposed for all to see. Item One was the fact that both Ernie's mum and dad had been born in the Irish Republic - and in Cork as well! Item Two was the historically verifiable fact that the Irish Republic had adopted a policy of neutality during the second world war. This meant that - in geo-political terms -the residents of prefab number fifteen were complicit in the Nazi war effort. And to cap it all one of the Gaelic clan had grievously wronged Len Sullivan by hitting his weakly delivered cricket ball for six without due cause.

Some people manage to acquire an uncanny knack of being able to walk into a betting shop in any town and place money on a horse which is destined to be pipped at the post into second place. Skills like these take years to cultivate.
Wads of money have been siphoned from our modest rented prefab into the splendid detached
house with a long winding gravel drive that is owned by the There Is One Born Every Minute bookmaker in Peterpoint Street. The old man takes his losses on the chin and says betting on horses is "just a bit of fun." It certainly is a bit of fun for the bookmaker in Peterpoint Street.
On Saturday mornings a small platoon of There Is One Born Every Minute gamblers assembles in the saloon bar of Smith's Wine Vaults. At hourly intervals eighty-six year old Harold - the oldest and most frail member of the group - is dispatched to Peterpoint Street with a batch of betting slips in his trembling hands. When he was away in the merchant navy Harold memorised hundreds of quotations from Immanuel Kant. This was one of his favourites:

It frequently happens that a man delivers his opinions with so much boldness and assurance that he appears to be under no apprehension as to the possibility of error. The offer of a bet startles him, and makes him pause.

There are no startled pauses in Smith's Wine Vaults.

When we heard an enormous thud against the front door late one Saturday afternoon we knew that the old man's legendary betting system had finally struck gold. Although his horse had come in second, the 'winning' horse had been subjected to a technical disqualification. The winnings had been promptly 'carpeted' and an enormous thud-making Persian carpet purchased.
The Smith's Wine Vaults' betting squad include Arthur Load (a postman), 'Monty' Trolley (a hospital porter), and Jim Smith (an 'industrial grade' civil servant.) After placing all his rent money on a rank outsider called Rent Boy Jim hit the jackpot and has been bought free drinks on the tale ever since. If you have been asked to supply the name of a referee on some official form then Jim Smith ('industrial grade' civil servant) is your man. He is employed at a top secret Ministry of Defence underground arms depot which will serve as an impregnable bunker retreat for key Government and military personnel in the event of a nuclear attack. We cannot reveal its location but a six mile long underground passage which runs in an esaterly direction from the Empire Hotel will take you there in no time.
In 1940 Jim Smith was taken to one side by the authorities and told to "watch his step." His hard-heeled shoes make a piercing rat-tat-tat sound whn he walks on a hard surface - you can hear his approach a mile off - and he had been half expecting to be told that this repeated rat-tat-tat sound was getting on the authorities' wick. So he was quite astonished to hear that the formal reprimand he was given was for remarks he had made about the German origins of the Royal Family.
Jim Smith once lived on the Blackway Estate which towers over Twiverton. On Saturday mornings he would rat-tat-tat his way down the hill and call into prefab number twenty-four for a smoke and a cup of tea. Prior to taking what Laurel and Hardy called an "egress" he would take a shiny silver coin from a trouser pocket and place it in the palm of my hand with a resounding "and the best of luck!" This sequence was as predictable as the back garden water butt filling to the brim after a heavy downpour of rain. And then - quite out of the blue - a Saturday morning came which lit no silver lights. The civil servant from the secret arms depot donned his overcoat and was half way out of the back door without even a hint of making the obligatory cash donation. (Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one calls this a "Black Swan Day" when "well established patterns and sequences turn out not to have been well established at all.") After flouting custom and precedent Mr J.Smith then had the nerve to look offended when I shouted out: "Got any money then!"
Although no shiny silver "and the best of luck!" coins ever came my way again, our contact in the civil service still allowed his name to be given as a referee/witness in any official applications. In prefab circles finding the name of someone with a half-credible claim to a coveted 'professional'
(albeit 'industrial grade') status is no easy matter. Dublin-born Jim Smith also acted as a referee/witness on political matters as well. Gamblers in Smith's Wine Vaults are kept well informed about the conduct of the British State in Ireland. "For the people back home 1649 was only yesterday" says Jim. "It is just ten generations since Oliver Cromwell's atrocities at Drogheda and Wexford were carried out." On one occasion a Protestant from Belfast wandered into Smith's Wine Vaults at the very moment when Jim Smith was in full flow. "Your friend has 'got it all wrong!" he told the assembled horse race betters. "Cromwell's actions were 'reprisals' for the events of 1641 when thousands of Anglo-Scottish Protestant settlers had been
slaughtered."
You might have thought that Jim Smith's stance on the Irish Question ("Or the British Question" as the James Joyce figure in the corner of the bar would say) might incline him to take a sympathetic stance on the plight of other peoples who have been subjected to colonial domination. The crooked timber of political emotion follows a different logic. After leaving the Blackway Estate for a flat in inner city Walcot Jim Smith started to make derogatory comments about people of colour. This did not impress the old man. "Pack in that show-off race talk!" the old man told him in the Empire Bar. "Or I will be putting my money on the Norfolk-reared horse called Oliver Cromwell!"

No prefab on our estate has an aura quite like the aura of prefab number forty-eight. This is because one of the residents of prefab number forty-eight is Miss Ann Brown-Sloane.
When a member of our religious studies class stumbled across the Biblical line about not "coveting your neighbour's donkey" 'Tubby' Lard motioned towards the unknowing Ann and said: "But sir, the passage in my copy of Exodus does not say donkey." This was unforgiveable.
While Ann Brown-Sloane resides in a six hundred square foot low status abode like the rest of us, hers is bathed in sultry, sweltering, glitzy, pulse-racing, Californian-style glamour.
When Phil (now nicknamed 'Dark Horse') Perkins was seen silhouetted in Ann's bedroom window tongues were bound to wag. Phil had once been a mainstay of the Saint Michael Is No Angel Sunday School before undergoing a crisis of faith. "The core doctrines are not literal truths" he told Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one. They have to be seen as metaphors. For example the idea of the the Virgin Birth is a metaphor to hide embarrassment over sex, and the Resurrection is a metaphor which masks our fear of death."
It was The Shock which brought Phil's crisis of faith to an ultimate point of crisis. An ever-dutiful son, Phil decied to spring clean his prefab when his parents gone to look around the new John Lewis store in Bristol city centre. With his own bedroom drawer neatly tidied he decided to tidy up his parents' drawers as well. This was how he came across a mysterious package that was wrapped up in musty yellowing pages of the Bath & Wilting evening paper. (How many dark and grissly secrets are wrapped up in musty yellowing pages of the Bath & Wilting!) Phil - who would soon be 'Dark Horse' - took a fleeting peek at its contents.
Twenty minutes later Phil was to be seen sobbing on the kerbstone in Woodhedge Road. This popular kerbstone stands just a few feet from the edge of Ann Brown-Sloane's bushy back garden. One of the silver-hubbed wheels of the frenetically driven Co-operative Mobile Shop Van ("share number 24419!") glanced one of his out-stretched legs. Hearing the screech of the ever-frenetically driven Co-op van Ann raced out of prefab and took the distraught Phil under her ever-fragrant wing. She sat him down in her sitting-room and helped him regain his composure by tuning her wireless to the Light Programme and listening to a repeat of Hancock's Half Hour.
"Who would have thought my own parents would ever have carried on like that!" said Phil as his tear-drenched face tumbled into the lap of Ann's warm embrace. (He would later recall falling into her lap "like a leaf from a tree" - his favourite line from W.B.Yeats.)
"Crikey!" said Ann - and "Crikey!" again - as the true gravity of what Phil had found in the carefully wrapped package in his parents' bottom drawer began to sink in.

"Stone me, what a life!" (Tony Hancock).

The Shock that had exploded "like a grenade in a greenhouse." (This was how Ann put it when she spoke to her friend Jane Lewis at prefab number thirteen a few hours later.) Jane told Ann it could have been worse. "Just think of The Shock of John Ruskin after he discovered that the angelic love of his life had pubic hairs." "Or the shock of romantic poets like Keats and Shelley when they discovered that their enchanted girl friend goddeses went to the lavatory to do a number two." Phil would remember the severe reprimand he had given to Roland Bollard in thekitchen of prefab number four. "Every kid on this estate", said Roland, "can be seen as a symbolic representation of a thousand encounters of the carnal kind." Now the stark visceral truth of Roland's words had been driven home by the discovery of a packet of contraceptives carefully concealed inside a Bath & Wilting inside a bottom drawer.
Nowadays hardly a day goes by without Phil ('Dark Horse') Perkins either popping into Ann Brown-Sloane's prefab for a few moments of fragrant solace or chatting to her on the kerbstone outside her sweetly scented garden. When Ann is nowhere to be seen he idles away the hours by staring into a small plastic gadget which reveals, with each unedifying click of its button, a new photograph of women's breasts. Such were the depths to which an unknown number of young residents of 1950s prefab estates had been known to sink.

The Swileys' prefab would be plastered with 'Vote Labour!' posters during election campaigns. In 1959 the Swileys even had a 'Vote Labour!' posters glued on their coalhouse door. For anyone who was even vaguely sympathetic to Labour this was bad news. The impact made by the posters on the Swileys' prefab was comparable to that of the Zinoviev Letter of 1924 which led to the fall of the first Labour Government.
Four general elections were held during our prefab years and the Conservative Party won three of them - the last three on the trot. "Which is one in the eye for the Trots!" said Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic with a mischievous wink. (His mischievous winks were completely wasted as Leon Trotsky was hardly a household word on the prefab estate.)
Twiverton forms part of the proletarian heartland of a Tory constituency and is solid Labour territory. However it seems unlikely that Twiverton will remain solidly Labour for very much longer. The rash of Swileys' 'Vote Labour!' posters acted as political acid in dissolving Labourist loyalties. The Conservative Party HQ on the London Road quickly cottoned on to the fact that the Swileys were a secret weapon, and if fewer than two posters were seen on display in prefab number twenty-five a batch of new super-sized ones were speedily delivered. Voters wearing red rosettes en route to cast a vote at the polling station would break down and sob if they caught sight of the forest of Swileys' 'Vote Labour!' posters. Other candidates sensed the chance to make a decisive breakthrough. (In the late 1950s and early 1960s these were Edgar Dickens - Bath Dickens Society stalwart and Liberal Party candidate, Edna Browning - recently knighted expert on trade union affairs from Tottenham and Conservative Party candidate, and Gilbert Youth of the World Government Party who - win or lose - would continue to hold his mild and bitter constituency surgeries in a number of local watering holes).
On each of the nine days of the 1926 General Strike copies of the Worker's Voice rolled off secret printing presses in railway arches on the Lower Bristol Road. One of its editorials
described Twiverton as "the linchpin of the 'proletarian red belt' of north-east Somerset, a hard-edged/soft water terrain inhabited by stone masons, cabinet makers, shop workers, solicitors' clerks, and domestic workers. Ghosts from its Chartist, Luddite, Leveller and Muggletonian past pace up and down its terraced streets." It is hard to see such Left political romanticism returning to Twiverton today (although history always likes to surprise.) The Conservative Party election victories of 1955 and 1959 signalled the emergence of what Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic in prefab number one likes to call "the effluent society." The concerns of the labourer in the prefab were pushed off the agenda of the political class, and those with terrapins in back gardens came into their own.