After leaving blitzed and battered Bristol behind and moving to soon to be blitzed and battered Bath the old man bumped into a chap with a gammy eye called 'Monty' Porter in the Kings Arms in Princess Street. The old man mistook 'Monty' for the legendary 'Smokey' White, a long-lost buddy who he had last seen on the London Embankment on a November evening in 1938. (The old man had given up coal mining for an above surface job as a lift-operator in a Waitrose supermarket store.) "What ever happened to 'Smokey' White?" was a question that was often heard from the late 1930s on. (Some say that 'Smokey' White was a mythical figure, an emblem for a lost sense of Old Working Class fraternity.)
The drinker in the saloon bar of the King's Arms turned out to be 'Monty', not 'Smokey'. This was at one and the same time a major loss and a signifiant gain. The old man had been labouring at Fairfield House on the Newbridge Road. (From 1936 to 1940 this was the residence of the exiled Emperor Haile Selassie.) Instead of having a sandwich at the Royal Oak something had prompted the old man to retrace his steps, re-take the road he had previously not taken, and walk into the King's Arms' welcoming embrace.
On the walls of the saloon bar of the King's Arms are drawings and paintings of the King's Bath. the pub is a few minutes stroll from Queens Square and apartments filled with delightful Queen Anne furniture. (Although the recently refurbished Assembly Rooms would soon be blown to bits by German bombers, the residents of Queen Square never had any doubts that their Queen Anne furniture would survive the war unscratched.)
'Monty' Porter was a regular at the King William on the London Road who had taken a liking to the Prince of Wales which is a stone's throw away from the King's Arms. When his building site work was finished he would stroll through Queen Victoria Park and have a "quick half" in the King's Arms before heading home. When he was mistaken for the legendary 'Smokey' White by the old man he said this was quite understandable. "For someone clearly fatigued after spending eight hours labouring for the Emperor of Ethiopia it is a wonder you did not mistake me for the author of The English Constitution!"

We never ran out of grub in the prefab. There was always a bowl of Weetabix, a boiled egg and a slices of toast around. On one Sunday we had a two course feast of chicken followed by jelly laced with condensed milk! The old man says that in the north of Italy lots of families have chicken every week! Our kitchen larder was never stocked to the brim like Auntie Eileen's in Talywain. But "we always had enough" (as my mum, looking back) would sayone day. In 1950 we even recieved a parcel of tinned fruit sent by Auntie Elma, my mum's sister.
'Tubby' Lard's mum says she hates the way that us humans eat sentient beings like cows and chickens and pigs are eaten by us humans, but she keeps on serving up bacon and eggs for breakfast. (The old man cracks jokes about "having bacon and eggs tomorrow - provided we find some bacon, and provided we find some eggs.") Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one calls himself a "meat-eating vegetarian" and took exception to a piece he read by George Orwell about beetroot juice drinkers and sandal wearing vegetarians.
The old man likes to celebrate the ending of rationing in 1954 by having a feast of fried bread, dripping, liver, kidneys, onions, and pigs' trotters - all cooked in a sea of hissing fat. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit Of Grease are the corner-stones of the Physiological Constitution of the Old Working-Class.
Someone on the wireless said this kind of fat-laden diet was a memory-reflex from the 1920s and 1930s when families in the coal-mining villages of South Wales were half starving. "Half-starving!" the old man said. "We lived like Kings in those days! During the 1926 General Strike we were roating sheep on the hillsides! With a shilling in your pocket you could get a hair cut, have a fish and chip supper, watch Ray Milland at the cinema, go out for a pint, and still have some change in your pocket! Prices were falling in those days and towns were not full of tenth rate punks!"
There are no guarantees that the work with Derro Enamels is going to last, so there is an 'eat up while you can' imperative in household like ours. That is why 'Tubby' Lard is not the only tubby chap around here. Extra reserves of body weight have to be built up in order to have a cushion when the lean times come. It is the prefab equivalent of saving up for a rainy day.

Within a couple of months of being put on the Derro Company payroll the old man was informed by the authorities that - as he was now working on the Continent for more than six months a year -he had ceased to be classed as a 'domiciled' resident of the United Kingdom. He was now a 'non-dom' and not officially resident in the UK for tax-paying purposes. And that was official!
Some people are born into'non-dom'status, some people achieve 'non-dom' status, and some people have 'non-dom' status thrust upon them. The days of being a bona fide payer of UK income tax were over kaput, finito, and up the creek. He could pay as much income tax as he liked to the tax collectors of Italy (are there any?) but the UK tax collectors wanted nothing to do with him. There was no point in him pacing up and down in the back yard and calling out "to be or not to be?" The tax man had given him the definitive answer.
In the 1950s not having to pay income tax meant that a household's pockets grew by a full eight per cent deeper! (Even after paying for the self-employed national insurance stamp you were quids in.)
You might think this was good news, but au contraire! The exclusion of the old man from the ranks of the income tax paying masses was a complete pain in the neck! Our peace of mind was knocked for six. We should have chained ourselves to the railings outside the tax inspector's office and held up our Let Us Pay Income Tax Like Everyone Else! placards.
Those who do not pay income tax are not fully paid-up citizens. Only those who have been lived in the shadows of Non-Dom-Ville are able to comprehend this truth. States which push their tax extraction powers too far give their income tax paying masses the glorious right to rebel. They can write glorious stories on the picture book of history. History would have been a damp squib if everyone had been a non-dom. There would be no Magna Carta, no Declaration of Independence, no idea of the 'The Rights of Man'. The tax authorities deprived the old man of his inalienable right to be a revolting peasant.
A nagging fear lurks in the shadowy recesses of our prefab an official letter from the Inland Revenue is going to land - and land with one almighty plop - on our front door mat. It will tell us there has been a minor slip-up, an administrative error, and the old man has in fact been liable to pay income tax after all! "So send us your cheque for twelve thousand pounds, twelve shillings and twelvepence halfpenny to us pronto. And we mean pronto!"
If the State does end up chasing us up for any income tax arrears we will have a Plan B in place. There are plenty of Continental bolt-holes to head for. Stamped on each page of the old man's cement-smeared passport are scores of names of ports of entry and border control stations: Indrejst aen, Chiasso, Kon Marchaussee, Halsingborg... Any of these could be our escape destination. We will catch an early train at Bath Spa station, head for the key junction of Mangotsfield (this will give off a false scent of our heading for the Midlands, Holyhead, and Ireland), and then turn east, board the boat train at Harwich under the cover of night, and then find an income tax paying job somewhere.

Every week during the 1930s scores of unemployed Welsh coalminers would head for sleeping berths on the London Embankment. George Edwards - a miner from Pontypool who had been blacklisted by the employers for his trade union activities - decided he would have to make his way to Canada if he was to find work
A complex range of factors can lead to people ending up "on the floor" (OTF). More often than not these are structural - the booms and slumps of the capitalist economy - but psychological flaws of character can sometimes play a part as well. The case of the Duke of Bristol who gambled and drank his vast fortune away was a source of endless fascination for the horse race betters who assembled on Saturday mornings at Smith's Wine Vaults. "Some people just want to end up on the floor!" said Arthur Post. 'Monty' Trolley was one of the first Bathonians (or Bath Onions as those born in Bath prefer to be called) to develop an interest in chaos theory. In fact it was a discussion he had with a local newspaper reporter that led to the "Chaos theory confirmed!" headline in the Bath & Wilting. "A gust of wind triggered by a freak storm in the Pacific led to the £1,000 cheque Bert Swiley had just pocketed from the ("we do not do refunds") One Is Born Every Minute! bookmakers in Peterpoint Street being snatched out of his cold sweaty hand. Mr Swiley told a reporter from that it meant he "was now officially 'on the floor' (OTF)."
Thanks to the Long Boom of Consumer Capitalism a diminishing number of people were finding themselves "on the floor" from the mid-1950s on. Yet money in the prefabs was still tight. When pupils at Weymouth House Technical School were invited to go on a four-day "low budget" trip to France both 'Ossie' Oster and 'Tubby' Lard raced home to tell their parents of the exciting news. (This was after Jane Lewis had stunned everyone by telling them that "oui" in French had nothing to do with going to the lavatory). 'Ossie' and 'Tubby' were stunned a second time in two days when they discovered that - far as their families were from being 'on the floor' - there was not enough money around for them to go on the trip. The upset they saw in their mums' eyes meant they would never mention a school trip ever again.