The past is a foreign country, and we cannot get there from here!

Many thanks for all of you who have logged on to 'The Prefab Files' (especially
to those who sent in their comments).

The plan is for 'The Prefab Files' to vanish into cyberspace soon.
Maybe the novel blog will be re-configured one day and will make
some kind of return.

Till, then, prefab buddies, adios!
......................................................

While the prefab estate had a distinctly egalitarian feel to it, the same could not be said of the wider society. Within three seconds of someone opening their mouth you would have a "good ideal" of the kind of school they had attended and their parents' occupations. (How things have changed since those dark 1950s' days! Nowadays working out someone's class background can take as long as six seconds.)
It is hard to imagine any of the debates which surfaced in the kitchens of the prefabs ever being engaged in today. For example in prefab number twelve - residence of Pete O'Clarke's old man - an epic debate once took place on the question of whether members of the working class were better persons - kinder, less likely to be selfish, and more concerned with the public good - than members of the middle class. (It had to be agreed in advance that the Swileys of prefab number twenty-six would be 'de-proletarianised' and placed in a 'miscellaneous' class category for the debate's duration. Otherwise the central proposition would have been shot to pieces within half a minute.)
Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one always relished taking a vigorously workerist line on issues of social controversy. Both Dai and Karl Marx were wary of the lumpen proletariat - "the dangerous class" - but he always had some complementary things to say about the upper class. (His Platonic friendship with a lady who lived in an exquisite Italian Villa could well have been a factor here.)
The segment of society Dai really had it in for was the middle-class. Or to be more precise he was highly critical of what he called "the petty bourgeois rump component of the middle-class", the types who had "managed to worm their way into supervisory office-type jobs and go round thinking they are a cut above everyone else." This stance caused some amusement among other prefab residents, not least because they felt that Dai himself had managed to "worm himself" into a supervisory office-type job. And Dai's next door neighbour - the string-vest-wearing-brown-ale-bottle-drinking 'Desperate' Dan at prefab number two - was always saying that Dai "represented the quintessence" of the petty bourgeois rump social type he so despised. "Ever since Lectic took that literature course with the Incredibly Rapid Results Correspondence College he has gone round thinking he is the incarnation of Charles 'Fleur de mal' Baudelaire.'