To get a panoramic view of our prefab estate you have to climb on to the roof of the yellow corrugated coal shed. Do not be taken in by the myth that there is little to see round here - especially on a Saturday! In the space of a couple of hours a super-charged trolley cart will race down the back road. A home made space rocket bursts into flames and stays obstinately rooted to Planet Earth. The two kids who made fall out and start wrestling on the green. Copper Jones gets off his bike, adjusts his cycle clips, and surveys his troubled terrain. A queue forms up by the Co-op van ("Share number 24419!") The oil-smeared face of Pete O'Clarke's old man looks up from the underside of his motor-bike side car. Ronnie Rogers' mum hangs up her seventh load of the day on the washing line. One of Semprini's Serenades crackles from a wireless set. An angry hound stares down at the chicken hut in Martin Filligan's smallholding and licks its lips. A roar goes up from Twiverton Park as the ball thuds into Merthyr Tydfil's net. (It is followed by groan - the goal has been disallowed!)
Look up to the hills of Lansdown. A cloud is giving a tentative caress to William Beckford's Tower. Beckford (1760-1844) inherited a fortune from his slave-based sugar plantations in Jamaica. He wrote the Gothic novel 'Vathek' (1786). No wonder the caress given by the cloud to Beckford's tower is a tentative one. No wonder the light green speckled hedge in our front garden is biding its time.

Copper Jones turned up late on Friday night at 'Ossie' Oster's place in prefab number seventeen. The family was woken up and given the bad news. 'Ossie' found it hard to make any sense of the news, and Copper Jones wondered if he had understood. Copper Jones was what Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) called 'a messenger'.

Walter Benjamin:
"A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead. For the community of all the dead is so immense that even he who only reports death is aware of it."

Similar knocks to those made by 'Copper Jones' are being made on unsuspecting doors every night of every week. Road 'accidents' have come to be regarded as some kind of law of nature. They are the modern day equivalent to being savaged by wolves in the dark forests of ancient times. (Except that today's 'wolves' have been fashioned and designed and glamourised by humans themselves.)
Some tricky logistical problems come with death in a prefab. When a coffin is wheeled in people areuncertain about where to put it. The hall is too small. the kitchen is out. The biggest room - the sitting room - is the obvious place, but place the coffin here and everyone can feel overwhelmed by the grief of it all. So it will often go into one of the two bedrooms. In 'Ossie' Oster's case it was placed in the bedroom where the ghost stories were once told, where you could hear the sound of trains hiss their way through the tunnel in the woods, where the paper-thin prefab walls acted as antennae into the surrounding darkness.

In the summer of 1954 every adult male on our estate had a job apart from the old man. A manager at the Derro Company had spoken to him in a manner which had offended his dignity.
Without cementing another furnace brick into place the old man picked up his bricklaying trowel and was off to Milan airport. "I have won a fortune of contracts for Derro and they talked to me like that!" he said as blew a breath of cool air over the plate of onion soup he had just brewed up. Another small footnote had been added to that massive tome Capital Versus Labour which drips from every pore with pain and hurt pride.
The old man's self-employed national insurance status meant that his eligibility for dole money was all but non-existent. In any case, claiming dole money had never been his style. So he battened down the hatches, dug deep into his financial reserves, sat in the armchair scratching the back of his head, and would stroll down to The Old Crown to work out how on earth he could make an egress from this perilous situation.
On Sunday evenings I would be taken to The Old Crown as well and sat down in the back room to study the stuffed fox in the glass box and listen to the ticks of the large black clock. The old man would ferry in supplies of ginger beer and cheddar cheese straws while engaging in scientific discussions with The Inventor. Despite being bald The Inventor managed to project the classic Albert Einstein wild hair look (he had lost his hair after an experiment had gone badly wrong.) Ever since 1945 The Inventor from Camelot Green had been battling away to get his invention patented. When drinkers in the saloon bar crowded around him and asked what this invention was he would first take them on a brisk e = mc squared theoretical detour. He would tell them that the universe is 14 billion years old, the solar system is five million years old, and that the galaxy measures 100,000 light years across ("with more stars than grains of sand.") He would point out that prior to the Cambrian Explosion of 536 million years ago our ancestors were "mere organisms in the sea." Pausing for a drink from his glass he would then point out that humans did not appear until two million years ago, and that our species' big breakthrough came 70,000 years ago with the invention of tools. The Inventor's introductory lecture would end with him saying: "And tools are my domain!"
The tool The Inventor had invented was an elastic device which stopped pyjama trousers from rolling up legs during the night. Most people were stunned and disappointed when they heard this. They felt it was something of a let-down. Yet The Inventor deserves some credit. Here was someone who refused to have his spirit crushed by the weight of all of the innovations and advances and works of genius and history-changing discoveries that had gone before him. Someone like Georg Simmel would have viewed his defiant never-say-die tenacity as somewhat
remarkable.

Georg Simmel (1858-1918):

"Here in buildings and in educational institutions, in the wonders and comforts of space-conquering technique, in the formations of social life and in the concrete institutions of the State is to be found such a richness of crystallizing, depersonalized cultural accomplishments that the personality can, so to speak, scarcely maintain itself in the face of it."