The 5A bus from Twiverton did not take you to any foreign country. It got as far as the
fountain by the Abbey with a "Water Is Best" inscription carved in stone. From there
members of the leisure class would make their way to the walled garden with exotic plants in Victoria Park, or the eerie echoing canal tunnels in Sydney Gardens, or to a secret path which winds its way up to Sham Castle. If the rain is pouring down they head for the cafe in the Market (where the play-things-close-to-your-chest Yorkshireman presides over the games and toys stall) or to one of the city's four cinemas where - in the early 1960s - there would be a chance of seeing the famous Peter Stuyvessant cigarette advertisement.
Hospital wards have been filled with inmates who chuckle at the recollection of the
advertisement's ersartz glamour! Peter Stuyvessant opened up with zappy fast-paced music and dazzling panoramic shots of beaming faces from glitzy boulevards and smart restaurants in London, Paris, New York and Rome. Pleasure seekers in the cinema's back row would prick up
their ears on hearing the words: "From city after city, people are smoking Peter Stuyvessant!" Lines of leather-clad bikers who remained rooted to their seats when the national anthem was being played would stand solemnly to attention on hearing the Peter Stuyvessant theme music explode from the screen.
'Ossie' Oster - resident of prefab number seventeen - was so taken by this advertisement that he bought three bumper-sized cellophane-wrapped packets of Peter Stuyvessant cigarettes to help light up his family's Christmas festivities. He had no way of knowing that the intended recipient had made a New Year's resolution to give up smoking for good (and that fate had decreed this resolution would be kept.)
For Peter Stuyvessant the future - like the past - had to be a foreign country.

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." This sentence of L.P. (Lesley Pool) Hartley deservedly won him a place in the hall of fame. During our prefab years Hartley was living in a house in Bathford which had once been the residence of the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce and the inventor of the Bath biscuit, Dr Oliver.
Hartley moved to Bathford from London after having been given a hard time by some stand-offish members of the Bloomsbury Group. He made one strategic intervention in local affairs. His novel 'The Boat' had been published in 1949 and he took a special pleasure in boating. What prompted his strategic intervention was an incident on the River Avon. A group of boys started throwing stones at him and his boat. Hartley was so inflamed by the incident that he wrote a letter to his go-between, the editor of the Bath & Wilting. His indignant missive about the boys' behaviour struck a chord with the mood of the time.
When drinkers in Smith's Wine Vaults heard of Hartley's letter they felt that their (never yet exercised) right to take a leisurely and unmolested row down the river had been snatched away. The remark made by one of their party was subsequently quoted in an untypically fierce Bath & Wilting editorial. It said "Those tenth rate punks are at it again!"
The stretch of the river on which L.P. Hartley got stoned is six miles to the east of our estate in Twiverton. This made it impossible for any canards to be hurled at the kids from the prefabs. We do things differently on our estate.