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.