The Prefab Files

LAST POSTING!

2011-02-14T19:09:00.002Z

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!
......................................................

EIGHTY-TWO

2011-02-05T12:40:00.004Z

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.'

EIGHTY-ONE

2011-01-16T12:47:00.007Z

While sat in the restaurant car of the Paris-Milan express the old man had the idea of writing an autobiography that would be called Being A Labourer Myself. Soon he would be checking into the Hotel Aosta in the centre of Milan, calling in at the city's Derro Enamels office, and then heading down to Naples and the tiny village of Casanouvo for a two-month stint of furnace bricklaying. Untold numbers of labourers born around 1915 must played with the idea of penning their own 'what-it-was-like-being-not-far-from-the-bottom' life-story. Usually such projects fell at the first hurdle and they were unable to come up with a title which rang true. The old man found a title with what a future Twiverton Literary Supplement reviewer would call "consummate ease", but subsquent life-story events were to blow him off course and the project was never completed. No bookshop shelves groan under the weight of this international enamel furnace bricklaying labourer's autobiography. ("And groan they most certainly would!" says TLS reviewer Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic, resident of prefab number one.)
With his Paris-Milan express restaurant car meal all but finished the old man caught sight of the breathtaking beauty of Lake Como. He felt its shimmering surface beam this message towards him: "A moment is passing in the history of the world of international enamel furnace bricklayers: capture it before it is too late!" A fraction of a moment later the American business executive from Omaha who was sat opposite him in the diner set off a conversation with the following words:

"Four of us are sat round this table. We are travelling on one of the crack trains of the Continent. A day is going to come when all these coaches will be scrap and dust and all the people laughing in this diner will have passed to ashes."

After taking a drink from his bottle of Italian beer (he hated the way plastic cups took away the purity of the taste) the old man said: "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die!"
"The man sat on the old man's right then said: "I run a law firm in New York city. What do you guys do?" The cigar smoker on the Omaha executive's left replied: "Right now I am just touring around. But back in the States I make movies." The three members of The Trans-National Global Elite then looked at the man armed with the bottle of Italian beer who had flecks of cement dust embedded in his finger-nails. In what a TLS reviewer would one day call a 'Carl Sandburg' breakthrough moment in the history of unfinished books, the old man stared out at the shimmering beauty of the northern Italian lake and said: "Being a labourer myself."

EIGHTY

2010-12-09T12:26:00.010Z

The green hills of Lansdown look down on our Somerset prefab, and somewhere beyond them are the imagined blue-tinted hills of the Welsh border. When the summer holidays come we get on the train for Newport, wait for the valleys bus outside Newport station, and an hour later we are staring at the culinary treasure trove that is Auntie Eileen's larder in Talywain. "Talywain, Oh Talywain!" as the poets of tomorrow will one day say. Whisper that name in prefab number twenty-four and toes start to tingle, pulses quicken, and heads turn giddy at the thought of double servings of bread and butter! "It is no accident" (to use Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic's favourite phrase) that both 'Holiday' and 'Talywain' are three-syllable words. Better-off kids whose parents could afford to pay for a holiday (and who ended up being booted out of Weymouth boarding houses at half past nine on rain swept mornings and told not to return until tea-time) must have raged with fury at the thought of our lingering in bed in Talywain and gazing out at the hill sides. No singing in riverside pubs for them , no passing the ball up and down Pontypool's famous rugby pitch, no throwing stones down disused mine shafts and holding one's breath as they send echos down towards the centre of the earth, no late-night tales of the ghost dogs that roamed down Monmouthshire's country lanes at dusk!
'Italians in the rain' (who turned out not to be Italian at all) were always singing arias from Verdi operas while digging holes in the roads and pavements of Talywain. The holiday excitement did not stop when you went indoors. Once the thrill of the journey from Somerset and the anticipation of what was in store reached such a crescendo of expectancy that I was unable to do what was discretely called my 'number two'. "Has he been yet?" my cousin kept on saying. Determined to bring about what is now called 'closure' on my embarrassing predicament I marched into the lavatory (never call it "the toilet" said the son of the slick salesman who lives in the corner prefab), dramatically slammed the door shut, and simulated momentous success and supreme relief with an emphatic pull of the chain and an ear-piercing shout of: "And about time!"
This cunning stratagem might have worked in sleepy Somerset, but in the high-oxygen terrain of the South Wales valleys they know their Von Clausewitz to their finger tips. My cousin had placed his ear against the lavatory door. "He didn't go, Auntie!" he shouted out in triumph as he raced into the sitting-room. "He just pretended!"

"That is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again." (A.E. Housman - 1859-1936.)

SEVENTY-NINE

2010-10-26T09:31:00.022+01:00

The creepiest place you could get to from our prefab estate was the dark stretch of river in the old industrial part of Twiverton. This is where the Silk-Farr mill once stood. The river is
hemmed in on all sides by crumbling brick-lined walls, and the currents swirl round in a demented panic to escape.

'The water is not lovely, though it is dark and deep
And I have promises to keep.'

(One of the first promises is to go somewhere else.) Just because this stretch of the river gives off an aura of dread and menace some kids cannot stop themselves being drawn towards it. They want to tempt the gods by engaging in all kinds of reckless acts of bravado. Even the iron bridge near-by has a sinister look which gets into the psyches of even unadventurous types and makes them want to dice with fate. (They should re-name it Thanatos Bridge but this would only edge some people on.) Ronnie Rogers from prefab number forty-three claims to have cycled across the high metal arch of the bridge from one side of the river to the other at least a dozen times! (The arches which span the bridge are no more than three inches wide and give bicycle tyres no grip at all.) "Any of you lot coming down to the iron bridge!" he shouts to us as he heads on his bike towards the grime-encrusted railway arch by the Lower Bristol Road.
Perhaps Ronnie does cycle across the arches of the iron bridge (although we suspect it is another
'Walter Mitty' fantasy.) Members of both the weightlifting and the philosophy clubs do not want to know. This murky stretch of water has ruined enough lives as it is. We count our lucky stars that we do not live close to it, and keep our fingers crossed that we will not have to face it until we are ready for the fight.

"Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and turns of the months and years, like a crouching beast in the jungle." (Henry James.)

SEVENTY-EIGHT

2010-09-17T12:31:00.006+01:00

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.

SEVENTY-SEVEN

2010-09-15T09:49:00.010+01:00

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.

SEVENTY-SIX

2010-09-14T10:55:00.016+01:00

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."

SEVENTY-FIVE

2010-08-13T09:19:00.015+01:00

When Ronnie Rogers enrolled for a course at the local Mechanics Institute in 1963 he was stunned to see that the chap standing ahead of him in the queue (the son of a naval officer who would make his mark as a Professor of Dilettante Studies at the University of the North Circular) was wearing a pair of jeans. In those days there was much uncertainty about whether turning up at a public institution in jeans was a way of 'taking the piss' or constituted the quintessence of cool. Ronnie was even more taken aback when the cool dude jeans wearer
introduced himself and shook hands. (Even today suit-wearing academics continue to be taken aback when the aristocrat they have invited to give a lecture turns up wearing jeans.)
The zeitgeist of the Mechanics Institute at this time - a heady brew of conservative traditionalism, anarcho-Marxism and self-seeking individualism - helped change Ronnie's life for good. He drifted further away from his prefab estate roots and came close to gravitating towards one of those de-centred and deracinated identities which was the cause of much existential anguish and political floundering during the next decades.
Ronnie signed up for the famous 'Bath PPE' course in politics, economics, and philosophy.
(While the 'Oxbridge PPE' opens doors to The Establishment, the 'Bath PPE' opens doors to Drinking Establishments.) Ronnie then went off to the Arty Little Cinema with the naval officer's son to watch Citizen Kane (1941).
Charles Foster Kane was a power-hungry newspaper tycoon with an American passport and a half-concealed Australian identity. In the film's deathbed scene Kane whispers the word 'Rosebud'. 'Rosebud' was the name of the sled he had been playing with as a young child a few moments before his mother called him into the house. He was then sent away from his home, with the beloved sled being left abandoned in the garden.
When the Arty Little Cinema's screening of Citizen Kane ended Ronnie Rogers wondered whether the bearings that had been bestowed on him by a benevolent slice of history might soon be lost. Perhaps his own prefab had been his 'Rosebud'. This feeling of the dye having been cast was to stay with him for years to come.

SEVENTY-FOUR

2010-08-12T12:47:00.006+01:00

Prison was Maxim Gorky's university, and the Arty Little Cinema was Ronnie Roger's. Tucked away in the quiet alley that led to the elite weightlifting gym - Le Club Musculation -it opened on the fortieth anniversary of the first public showing of film in Paris in 1896. Ronnie's driving ambition - he called it "the fierce urgency of now" - was to review films in New York for Vanity Fair. He posted a formidable work of fiction (it was called 'My CV') off to America, signed up for
evening classes at the local technical college, bought a duffle coat, drifted along to jazz nights at the Bell Inn, and sipped glasses of barley water in what 'Tubby' Lard called "that citadel of posers" - the Salamander coffee bar - while leafing through a red and white covered 1962 edition of Yevtushenko's poems.
There was one Yevtuschenko poem which held Ronnie Rogers in its grip for the next seven years. In 'Encounter' the poet describes how he was once sat in the aerodrome cafe in Copenhagen, a place where "everything was brilliance and comfort." Then he saw an old man with a white beard (a beard stained with flecks of blood from hundreds of ' I am a hell of a tough guy' hunting expeditions) plough "a furrow through the crowded room." When he reached the bar the old man with a white beard demanded a Russian vodka. He waved "away soda with a 'No'."
The old man was Ernest Hemingway.
Within two months Ronnie Rogers had grown a beard of his own. He strode into the Bell Inn and demanded a Russian vodka. (but had to make do with a pint of scrumpy instead.) Ronnie had to wait for a vodka until another time, but in that moment he knew he had left his beloved Twiverton behind perhaps for good. He had succumbed to the charms, limited as they were, of the arty wing of the neighbouring city's petty bourgeoisie (semi-intellectual segment.)
Residents on the prefab estate furrowed their brows. They could sense he was losing it.

SEVENTY-THREE

2010-08-06T11:16:00.007+01:00

Swansea born Richard 'Beau' Nash (like the old man a couple of centuries later) was a Welshman who took the sleepy backwater of Bath by storm. This dazzling dandy and talented cultural entrepreneur - Beau Nash, not the old man - became Master of Ceremonies in 1704, and over a span of fifty-eight years used his flair, charm and panache to smooth away a few of the rough edges of this brawling/belching/elbow-them-out-of-your-way cut-throat urban jungle.
When an art-deco cinema opened in the city in 1929 it had to be named the Beau Nash. The doormen it employed might have been expected to try and emulate some of the original Master of Ceremonies' qualities of flair and panache. Au contraire! as the slick salesman in prefab number forty-six would be sure to say. So when they overheard 'Tubby' Lard making a joky aside about having plenty of razor blades ready to slash a few of the cinema's seats led to us all being given an immediate life ban. (Unknown to 'Tubby' a band of razor-slashing Teddy Boys had paid a visit to this very cinema just a few hours before!)
This meant our future cinema visits had to be confined to the Fort Rum Cinema (built in 1934 to double up as an air-hanger), the 1930s' constructed Arty Little Cinema and Willowby Road Cinema based in Goldfield Park. (By a strange coincidence George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) mentions a Willowby Road which was "not definitely slummy, only dingy and depressing.") In April 1942 an air-shelter opposite the Willowby Road Cinema took a direct hit in the Bath Blitz and seventeen people were killed. Twenty years later the cinema was bulldozed down and a supermarket was built on its site. Goldfield Park has been on a downward slide ever since.
After hearing about the air shelter bombing 'Tubby' Lard complained of feeling ill whenever he visited the cinema in Willowby Road. He decided to go on long walks in Pennyquick Woods instead. And it was during one of these Pennyquick Woods walks that 'Tubby' first hit on the Buddhist idea of imagining he was watching the movie of his own life. 'Tubby' has been going for long walks and watching this favourite movie ever since.

SEVENTY-TWO

2010-07-29T09:42:00.008+01:00

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.

SEVENTY-ONE

2010-07-18T09:41:00.007+01:00

"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.

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

2010-06-05T10:37:00.000+01:00

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

SIXTY-NINE

2010-05-28T09:33:00.009+01:00

A film which filtered through the fourth wall of Le Club Musculation and brought the weightlifting session to a halt was Jean Genet's The Balcony. The bull-necked crew-cutted butcher's shop owner who ran the gym said the film represented a bid at "penetrating the mythologies that cloak every regime of power." It was certainly a change from the Jerry Lewis comedies and repeats of the The Dambusters which were the usual film-going fare of the time. We ended up hanging up our dumb-bells and going into the Arty Little Cinema next door to watch the second half. We realised that the cinema screen was directly behind the wall mirror on to which some club members would cast the occasional narcissistic glance.
After the semi-professional weightlifters of Le Club Musculation had finished their bone-crushing work-outs an entire glass of milk (laced with a drop of brandy) and mixed with a couple of raw eggs would be knocked back in a couple of gulps. The squad would then head for home and polish off an under-done steak.
The Arty Little Cinema thrives even to this day, but sadly Le Club Musculation and the
celebrated paper-thin fourth wall are no more. In its place stands a newly-built block of luxury mock neo-Georgian apartments which serve as pied-a'-terres for former hedge fund managers who are lying low. What has not vanished is the distinctive Le Club Musculation demeanour and style, the eye-catching combination of shades, tee-shirts, jeans, light brown ultra-flexible shoes, and crew-cut hair styles that an still be seen in the finest training venues. These are the surface appearances of those who have ventured on to The Balcony of life and penetrates the secrets that lie beyond the Fourth Wall.

SIXTY-EIGHT

2010-05-22T11:34:00.010+01:00

When you have one hundred and forty pounds of weights dangling over your head the sounds of hot embraces, husky voices, sighs, panting, thrusts and counter-thrusts can sometimes be a shade distracting. This was Le Club Musculation's big drawback. The elite gym could well have been the only one in England (although maybe not in Wales) where the sound of bodices and silken under-garments being ripped off with great gusto was par for the course when it came to the routine performance of squats, bench presses, and dumb-bell exercises.
Three of the walls of Le Club Musculation were formidable constructions built out of the finest Bath stone. However the fourth wall did not quote fit the bill. The fourth wall was constructed in the classic 1940s' paper-thin prefab tradition. And it was the fourth wall which had the Herculean task of separating Le Club Musculation from the small auditorium of the cinema next door.
Only a handful of risque films were publicly screened in sleepy Somerset towns in the early post-war decades. Managers of the mainstream Beau Nash, Scala, and Odeon cinemas could be relied on to give a thumbs-down to any films which gave off a hint on avante-garde sensibility. Only the Arty Little Cinema was different. And it was the Arty Little Cinema which was the other side of Le Club Musculations' fourth wall.
This meant that just a few slivers of cardboard and crumbling plaster stood between the deep breathing passionate weightlifters who were stretching out their physiques out on Le Club Musculation's sweaty benches and the deep breathing passionate actresses who were stretching out their somewhat more lithe physiques on sweaty Parisian and Stockholm bedsteads on the screen of the Arty Little Cinema. The weightlifters of Le Club Musculation did not have anything against Erotic Sound Effects per se. ("Au contraire!" as the slick salesman who lived in prefab number forty-six in Woodhedge Road would have been the first to say.) What ruffled the weightlifters' feathers was what they called "unexpected trajectories." (i.e. the sudden intersection of a burst of Erotic Sound Effects with a highly-exacting and potentially life-threatening heavy object weight movement.) First-aid records show that hardly a month went by in 1962/1963 without a hyper-ventilating weightlifter losing himself in a world of nubile fantasy and dropping a fifty-pound dumb-bell on another weightlifter's foot. (And on one tragic occasion on another weightlifter's delicate protruding body part.)

SIXTY-SEVEN

2010-05-11T09:33:00.013+01:00

Every prefab estate in 1950s' Britain had its Renaissance figure and Pete O' Clarke's old man in prefab number twelve was ours. He cut a dashing figure as he roared off on his motor bike (and side-car) for another gruelling shift at Bath Cabinet Makers. Some other so-called Renaissance figures are little more than image and surface glamour. Pete O' Clarke's old man xould have been taken fom the pages of Marx's The German Ideology. This was the non-alienated man who would sometimes be seen fishing in the afternoon, rearing cattle in the evening, and engaging in literary criticism after dinner. His cousin - a factory worker in Swindon - managed to teach himself Greek and Latin by chalking up the grammar on his workplace lathe! Should History take one of its ugly backward turns - if things started getting rough - you can count on the likes of Pete O'Clarke's old man and his cousin in Swindon to put themselves into the right place at the right time and do the right thing.
It was in 1958 that Pete O'Clarke's old man decided to build a metal scaffold bar in his back yard, and kids have been doing pull-ups and acrobatic curls on it ever since. In 1959 he converted the garden shed into a weightlifting gym, and nowadays a squad of aspiring Charles Atlas types turn up to do work-outs there most evenings every week. Once a month they board
the 5A bus into town and make their way to Le Club Musculation to train with the semi-professionals - "the creme-de-la-creme of raw muscle" as Ann Brown-Sloane admiringly calls them - in an equipment packed gym in an alley near the Co-operative Store in the centre of town.
The elite gym's manager is a cousin of Pete O'Clarke's old man's Swindon cousin. (He has a butcher's shop on the edge of Kingsmead Square.) With his bull-like neck of steel and razor-edged crew-cut you can spot him a mile off. Do a two hour training session at Le Club Musculation, breathe in its pulsating ethos, and your arm, leg and chest muscles and sense of self-belief can be felt bulging out into the biosphere! No wonder Precious McKenzie - the Bristol-based weightlifter and holder of a Commonwealth Games gold medal - told the sports editor of the Bath & Wilting that Le Club Musculation "is destined to become a legend in another lifetime!" Yet the kids from the prefabs would never have stepped into Le Club Musculation without first stepping into the garden shed gym in Pete O'Clarke's back yard. This Renaissance figure showed Prefab Land youth what dedication and self-discipline can achieve. Hardly anyone remembers Pete O'Clarke's old man today, yet he lit a flame which was to shine through the rest of our days.
The prefab gym built and inspired by Pete O'Clarke's own imagination had no drawbacks at all. However we cannot deny that La Club Musculation had one drawback, one awry ingredient, which in retropspect was the defining mark of the experience of all who sweated on its benches and limped out of its illustrious portal.

SIXTY-SIX

2010-05-03T14:14:00.015+01:00

'Monty' Porter was not just a big admirer of Walter Bagehot. He was an admirer of 'Ernie' Bevin as well. Bevin was the Bristol drayman and trade unionist who was Foreign Secretary in Attlee's Labour Government.
In 1947 when he was working on a farm in Winsford - the village in Somerset where Bevin had been born - 'Monty' was told of Bevin's decision to order the Exodus - a ship packed with Jewish refugees - to return to the very country which had strained every muscle to slaughter them. (It was said locally that Bevin thought his father - who he had never known - had been Jewish and he was taking the opportunity of settling an old score.)
'Monty' thought Bevin's Exodus decision was badly mistaken. However in 1951 his estimation of Bevin went up a few notches. This was after he read a newspaper article in which Bevin stated
he should "be able to buy a ticket at Victoria Station to go anywhere I damn well please!" This made quite an impact on 'Monty' who had a hunger for travel (despite having only been out of Somerset twice.)
Another phrase from Bevin played a part in one of the big life-changing events in 'Monty's life. Tit-Bits magazine had carried a full page advertisement for a "Save A Fortune Cut Your Own Hair Clipper!" After taking the bait 'Monty' discovered that the "Save A Fortune Cut Your Own Hair Clipper!" was not content with just cutting his hair. It wanted to cut pieces of skin and flesh as well! It was when 'Monty' Porter was still in a state of heavily bandaged shock he came across a quotation from Ernie Bevin which really hit home. The man from Winsford had declared that the big problem with the British Working-Class was its "poverty of aspirations." It dawned on 'Monty' that his own poverty of aspirations had been the direct cause of his own bloodied head. The days of his trying to cut his own hair were gone for ever.
A few days later 'Monty' Porter was seen storming into the Winter Palace of the new semi-skyscraper department store in Bristol city centre. Within less than an hour he had sprayed a dazzling "live now, pay later!" signature on the dotted line of a five hire-purchase (HP) agreements. Buying goods on the 'never never' became second-nature for the smartly turned out 'Monty'. Some prefab residents were soon following his well coiffured lead. Those who signed 1950s' 'HP' agreements were also signing execution warrants for the old low aspirations social order.

SIXTY-FIVE

2010-05-02T11:05:00.015+01:00

'Monty' Porter once bought a second-hand tweed jacket which had a copy of Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution (1867) in one of its side pockets. 'Monty' noticed that as soon as his fellow drinkers spotted his Walter Bagehot they would start giving far more careful consideration to the weight and bulk of his arguments than had previously been the case. The book's title triggered much debate. Welshmen, Scotsmen, and Ulstermen wondered how on earth a book on the United Kingdom's constitution could be called have the English Constitution. Dapper types with Queen Anne furniture in Queen's Square apartments never saw this as a problem. Soon the once solitary 'Monty' Porter was seen as the King's Arm's pre-eminent authority on constitutional issues. He would never dream of entering a public house without having Bagehot's elegantly written text somewhere on his person. The combined impact of a top-notch tweed jacket and Bagehot's The English Constitution transformed a bloke who had grown up in Peasedown with a gammy eye into a force to be reckoned with.
In his youth 'Monty' Porter had been fascinated by Oliver Cromwell and took a republican stance in public bar debates. The royalist and aristocratic lexiography of public house names in Bath became a source of irritation. He would compalin that "after a couple of pints in the Duke of Cambridge, or the Duke of York, or the Duke of Cumberland, or the King's Head, or the King of Wessex, or the King Bladud, or the Queen Charlotte, or the Queen's Head, or the Queen Adelaidey, you did not know which crowned lord to give a salutation to!"
Constant reading of The English Constitution led 'Monty' to take a different stance. Bagehot's line about the country being "a disguised republic" was taken to heart. He now saw the aristocratic and monarchical pub signs as performing a vital stabilising role in sustaining the political order. "Without them the political system would shatter into a million shards of glass, and Thomas Hobbes' war of all against all would tear the country apart." The transformation of the Peasedown champion of republicanism into a conservative who only drank in public houses which had royalist-affiliated names became the talk of his old village.
If 'Monty' had never bought his second-hand jacket with a copy of The English Constitution in one of its side-pockets he would have just been a solitary bloke with a gammy eye reading the Daily Mirror in a corner of the saloon bar. Thanks to his Walter Bagehot he had become someone with something to say.
In the 1950s almost a quarter of public houses had royalist or aristocratic names. What kind of ideological impact this had is hard to say. As for the old man he was always on the look out for a public house called The 'Smokey' White.

SIXTY-FOUR

2010-04-25T12:50:00.015+01:00

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!"

SIXTY-THREE

2010-04-18T15:06:00.011+01:00

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.

SIXTY-TWO

2010-04-09T08:45:00.013+01:00

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.

SIXTY-ONE

2010-04-03T09:07:00.014+01:00

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.

SIXTY

2010-03-28T11:53:00.011+01:00

People are always asking where the old man got his big career break and was able to acquire the
coveted skills of furnace bricklaying. This happened when he was working in the Black Country in Brierley Hill. It was from there that he landed a job with a Rotterdam-based company called Derro Enamels. Without the likes of Derro Enamels the Long Post-War Consumer Boom (which floated on oceans of refrigerators and washing-machines) would never have left port!
When the old man heads off to the Continent with his American movie-style hat, American movie-style suit, Orson Wells-style loosened tie and bulky trowel-filled travel bag, the old man cuts a distinctive worker aristocrat figure. When he returns to the prefab the place becomes choc-o-bloc with bottles of brandy and boxes of Dutch cigars. The phrase "Jack is back!" is whispered in saloon bars by canny characters who are on the look out for a free pint.
It is not too long before the Derro Enamels money-fuelled euphoria subsides and the worker aristocrat image looks a little frayed at the edges. When the old man is directing enamel furnace operations abroad he does not simply get a wage: his living expenses are paid as well! When he is waiting at home to be called for his next job he no wages at all - not a cent. Derro Enamels expect him to become a luftmensch - someone who lives on air alone - and were it not for mum's prolific budgeting skills we would soon be heading for Skintsville. In Skintsville everyone is either "on the floor", about to be "on the floor", or recovering from being "on the floor." When the Secret History of the British Working-Class is finally published its title will be "On The Floor (OTF)."
On evenings with a harvest moon when the owl in Silk-Farr's Wood is hooting eerily away unexpected events are prone to happen. On one such evening the old man returned from The Green Tree with a homeless pub pianist in tow. The pianist had uttered the "OTF" phrase, and this phrase can be guaranteed to open the old man's empathic heart. Whenever I see a harvest moon or an owl gives off an eerie hoot - especially if a chill wind is whistling outside - thoughts go back to the homeless pub pianist the old man brought home from The Green Tree. Has this sad- eyed maestro managed to find a secure sofa berth for the night or has his luck finally run out with him ending up "on the floor?"

FIFTY-NINE

2010-03-19T15:53:00.019Z

'Tubby' Lard likes to come out with things which take all of us aback. For example the other night he pulled up on his bike and said: "Do none of you realise that the life you lead on this prefab estate is risibly claustrophobic!"
Gary Bollard of prefab number four was clearly needled by this. "Just what do you expect! There are caravan sites which are bigger and have more facilities than this place!"
"And caravan sites have lots of different people who are constantly coming and going" said Len Sullivan (prefab number thirty-three.) "There is not much coming and going around here. Almost everyone who moved into these prefabs back in the late 1940s is still here today. And what makes things worse is the fact that other people - especially those who live up in the Admiralty council houses in Camelot Green - steer well clear of us."
"That could be because they kow about the prefabs' asbestos-lined walls" suggested Adrian Denton. (The resident of prefab number thirty-six had been coughing away for a couple of weeks.) "They might not be steering clear of the estate because of us."
"Well they can steer clear of us for good" said Jane Lewis of prefab number thirteen. "That is their problem. In Gloucestershire they say 'You only miss the water when the well is dry'. Well, the well we are drinking from is not dry at all. It is full to the brim with our families and friends. 'People like 'Tubby' Lard are going to miss this 'risible claustrophobic' place like mad one day."
(Jane ignored the sniggers which followed her "Well the well").
"It is alright for you, Jane" someone passing by said. "You don't have to live next door to the Swileys!"
"But Jane is right!" said Adrian Denton. (Adrian was in a buoyant mood despite nursing the latest black eye that his old man, the grumpy bus conductor known as Hawkeye, had given him). "Just think of all the games we play and the laughs we have here."
"And just think of all the people who are laughing at us!" said 'Tubby' Lard. "What you forget is that those who do not live in prefabs like to cheer themselves up by making fun of people who do!"
"One of the hard truths about our small prefab world is that it is too inward looking" said 'Ossie' Oster from prefab number seventeen. We hardly ever come across anyone who lives in a real house and goes to a real school - the ones with tennis courts and libraries filled with books on Greek and Latin. Do we travel to Athens and Rome? Do we meet lots of smart people? No - we
fritter our summer holidays away by sitting on top of coalhouse roofs and let our brains rust away."
"It's all summed up by Mark 4: 25" said Len Sullivan. (The resident of prefab number thirty-three enjoyed showing off the fruits of learning from his Saint Michael Is No Angel Sunday School days.)

'For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.'

What the author of these words sid was to completely suss out the way social structures like ours works."
"For heaven's sake, give it a rest and wake up!" (Ann Brown-Sloane had a knack of having the final say.) "Jane Lewis sems to be the only one around here who really understands just how stupendously rich we all are. We have homes to go to, we have loads of friends!" ("Well, you do!" whispered Len). "We really belong. We live in lovely places with mod. cons. and gardens. We enjoy the kind of freedom which people laid down their lives for. What we should be doing is thanking our lucky stars and grabbing hold of the feast of life!"
Len Sulivan muttered something about grabbing hold of the feast who was sat just a few feet away from him. But the debate was over. There was even a round of applause for Ann Brown-Sloane. Her magic had worked once again.

FIFTY-EIGHT

2010-03-08T16:00:00.009Z

The idea of setting up a Prefab Philosophy Club took off in a big way when we were sat on the kerbstone at the top of Woodhedge Road. The desultory penalty kicking against the black painted school gate had come to a halt, and a hunger was in the air for some intellectual work. Gazing up at the bright blue sky we saw a solitary shining cloud in the shape of the British Isles was hovering directly above us. 'Tubby' Lard hit the nail on the head when he said: "It is as if the Gods have ripped our country's page from their atlas of the world and magnified it a thousand times!" Ann Brown-Sloane recalls this moment "a numinous epiphany, a meeting of Joan of Arc and William Blake in the Twiverton heavens!" For Gary Bollard this was a moment of definitive change: "The days of life on our prefab estate being poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short are over!"
The long Summer holiday was drawing to a close and we had been kicking our heels around for too long. If there had been tennis courts and a swimming pool near-by everything would have felt different. As it was our brains had been atrophying and our physiques going flabby. We needed a new agenda, something which would galvanize us into life and stop us going to the dogs! Something which would endow our prefab estate with a slice of panache and kudos and counter the condescension of the non-prefab world. We had to raise our game and get noticed. We had to set up a philosophy club!

FIFTY-SEVEN

2010-02-26T14:33:00.012Z

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.

FIFTY-SIX

2010-02-25T14:27:00.014Z

Some people manage to acquire an uncanny knack of being able to walk into a betting shop in any town and place money on a horse which is destined to be pipped at the post into second place. Skills like these take years to cultivate.
Wads of money have been siphoned from our modest rented prefab into the splendid detached
house with a long winding gravel drive that is owned by the There Is One Born Every Minute bookmaker in Peterpoint Street. The old man takes his losses on the chin and says betting on horses is "just a bit of fun." It certainly is a bit of fun for the bookmaker in Peterpoint Street.
On Saturday mornings a small platoon of There Is One Born Every Minute gamblers assembles in the saloon bar of Smith's Wine Vaults. At hourly intervals eighty-six year old Harold - the oldest and most frail member of the group - is dispatched to Peterpoint Street with a batch of betting slips in his trembling hands. When he was away in the merchant navy Harold memorised hundreds of quotations from Immanuel Kant. This was one of his favourites:

It frequently happens that a man delivers his opinions with so much boldness and assurance that he appears to be under no apprehension as to the possibility of error. The offer of a bet startles him, and makes him pause.

There are no startled pauses in Smith's Wine Vaults.

When we heard an enormous thud against the front door late one Saturday afternoon we knew that the old man's legendary betting system had finally struck gold. Although his horse had come in second, the 'winning' horse had been subjected to a technical disqualification. The winnings had been promptly 'carpeted' and an enormous thud-making Persian carpet purchased.
The Smith's Wine Vaults' betting squad include Arthur Load (a postman), 'Monty' Trolley (a hospital porter), and Jim Smith (an 'industrial grade' civil servant.) After placing all his rent money on a rank outsider called Rent Boy Jim hit the jackpot and has been bought free drinks on the tale ever since. If you have been asked to supply the name of a referee on some official form then Jim Smith ('industrial grade' civil servant) is your man. He is employed at a top secret Ministry of Defence underground arms depot which will serve as an impregnable bunker retreat for key Government and military personnel in the event of a nuclear attack. We cannot reveal its location but a six mile long underground passage which runs in an esaterly direction from the Empire Hotel will take you there in no time.
In 1940 Jim Smith was taken to one side by the authorities and told to "watch his step." His hard-heeled shoes make a piercing rat-tat-tat sound whn he walks on a hard surface - you can hear his approach a mile off - and he had been half expecting to be told that this repeated rat-tat-tat sound was getting on the authorities' wick. So he was quite astonished to hear that the formal reprimand he was given was for remarks he had made about the German origins of the Royal Family.
Jim Smith once lived on the Blackway Estate which towers over Twiverton. On Saturday mornings he would rat-tat-tat his way down the hill and call into prefab number twenty-four for a smoke and a cup of tea. Prior to taking what Laurel and Hardy called an "egress" he would take a shiny silver coin from a trouser pocket and place it in the palm of my hand with a resounding "and the best of luck!" This sequence was as predictable as the back garden water butt filling to the brim after a heavy downpour of rain. And then - quite out of the blue - a Saturday morning came which lit no silver lights. The civil servant from the secret arms depot donned his overcoat and was half way out of the back door without even a hint of making the obligatory cash donation. (Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one calls this a "Black Swan Day" when "well established patterns and sequences turn out not to have been well established at all.") After flouting custom and precedent Mr J.Smith then had the nerve to look offended when I shouted out: "Got any money then!"
Although no shiny silver "and the best of luck!" coins ever came my way again, our contact in the civil service still allowed his name to be given as a referee/witness in any official applications. In prefab circles finding the name of someone with a half-credible claim to a coveted 'professional'
(albeit 'industrial grade') status is no easy matter. Dublin-born Jim Smith also acted as a referee/witness on political matters as well. Gamblers in Smith's Wine Vaults are kept well informed about the conduct of the British State in Ireland. "For the people back home 1649 was only yesterday" says Jim. "It is just ten generations since Oliver Cromwell's atrocities at Drogheda and Wexford were carried out." On one occasion a Protestant from Belfast wandered into Smith's Wine Vaults at the very moment when Jim Smith was in full flow. "Your friend has 'got it all wrong!" he told the assembled horse race betters. "Cromwell's actions were 'reprisals' for the events of 1641 when thousands of Anglo-Scottish Protestant settlers had been
slaughtered."
You might have thought that Jim Smith's stance on the Irish Question ("Or the British Question" as the James Joyce figure in the corner of the bar would say) might incline him to take a sympathetic stance on the plight of other peoples who have been subjected to colonial domination. The crooked timber of political emotion follows a different logic. After leaving the Blackway Estate for a flat in inner city Walcot Jim Smith started to make derogatory comments about people of colour. This did not impress the old man. "Pack in that show-off race talk!" the old man told him in the Empire Bar. "Or I will be putting my money on the Norfolk-reared horse called Oliver Cromwell!"

FIFTY-FIVE

2010-02-14T11:52:00.017Z

No prefab on our estate has an aura quite like the aura of prefab number forty-eight. This is because one of the residents of prefab number forty-eight is Miss Ann Brown-Sloane.
When a member of our religious studies class stumbled across the Biblical line about not "coveting your neighbour's donkey" 'Tubby' Lard motioned towards the unknowing Ann and said: "But sir, the passage in my copy of Exodus does not say donkey." This was unforgiveable.
While Ann Brown-Sloane resides in a six hundred square foot low status abode like the rest of us, hers is bathed in sultry, sweltering, glitzy, pulse-racing, Californian-style glamour.
When Phil (now nicknamed 'Dark Horse') Perkins was seen silhouetted in Ann's bedroom window tongues were bound to wag. Phil had once been a mainstay of the Saint Michael Is No Angel Sunday School before undergoing a crisis of faith. "The core doctrines are not literal truths" he told Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one. They have to be seen as metaphors. For example the idea of the the Virgin Birth is a metaphor to hide embarrassment over sex, and the Resurrection is a metaphor which masks our fear of death."
It was The Shock which brought Phil's crisis of faith to an ultimate point of crisis. An ever-dutiful son, Phil decied to spring clean his prefab when his parents gone to look around the new John Lewis store in Bristol city centre. With his own bedroom drawer neatly tidied he decided to tidy up his parents' drawers as well. This was how he came across a mysterious package that was wrapped up in musty yellowing pages of the Bath & Wilting evening paper. (How many dark and grissly secrets are wrapped up in musty yellowing pages of the Bath & Wilting!) Phil - who would soon be 'Dark Horse' - took a fleeting peek at its contents.
Twenty minutes later Phil was to be seen sobbing on the kerbstone in Woodhedge Road. This popular kerbstone stands just a few feet from the edge of Ann Brown-Sloane's bushy back garden. One of the silver-hubbed wheels of the frenetically driven Co-operative Mobile Shop Van ("share number 24419!") glanced one of his out-stretched legs. Hearing the screech of the ever-frenetically driven Co-op van Ann raced out of prefab and took the distraught Phil under her ever-fragrant wing. She sat him down in her sitting-room and helped him regain his composure by tuning her wireless to the Light Programme and listening to a repeat of Hancock's Half Hour.
"Who would have thought my own parents would ever have carried on like that!" said Phil as his tear-drenched face tumbled into the lap of Ann's warm embrace. (He would later recall falling into her lap "like a leaf from a tree" - his favourite line from W.B.Yeats.)
"Crikey!" said Ann - and "Crikey!" again - as the true gravity of what Phil had found in the carefully wrapped package in his parents' bottom drawer began to sink in.

"Stone me, what a life!" (Tony Hancock).

The Shock that had exploded "like a grenade in a greenhouse." (This was how Ann put it when she spoke to her friend Jane Lewis at prefab number thirteen a few hours later.) Jane told Ann it could have been worse. "Just think of The Shock of John Ruskin after he discovered that the angelic love of his life had pubic hairs." "Or the shock of romantic poets like Keats and Shelley when they discovered that their enchanted girl friend goddeses went to the lavatory to do a number two." Phil would remember the severe reprimand he had given to Roland Bollard in thekitchen of prefab number four. "Every kid on this estate", said Roland, "can be seen as a symbolic representation of a thousand encounters of the carnal kind." Now the stark visceral truth of Roland's words had been driven home by the discovery of a packet of contraceptives carefully concealed inside a Bath & Wilting inside a bottom drawer.
Nowadays hardly a day goes by without Phil ('Dark Horse') Perkins either popping into Ann Brown-Sloane's prefab for a few moments of fragrant solace or chatting to her on the kerbstone outside her sweetly scented garden. When Ann is nowhere to be seen he idles away the hours by staring into a small plastic gadget which reveals, with each unedifying click of its button, a new photograph of women's breasts. Such were the depths to which an unknown number of young residents of 1950s prefab estates had been known to sink.

FIFTY-FOUR

2010-02-07T13:23:00.012Z

The Swileys' prefab would be plastered with 'Vote Labour!' posters during election campaigns. In 1959 the Swileys even had a 'Vote Labour!' posters glued on their coalhouse door. For anyone who was even vaguely sympathetic to Labour this was bad news. The impact made by the posters on the Swileys' prefab was comparable to that of the Zinoviev Letter of 1924 which led to the fall of the first Labour Government.
Four general elections were held during our prefab years and the Conservative Party won three of them - the last three on the trot. "Which is one in the eye for the Trots!" said Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic with a mischievous wink. (His mischievous winks were completely wasted as Leon Trotsky was hardly a household word on the prefab estate.)
Twiverton forms part of the proletarian heartland of a Tory constituency and is solid Labour territory. However it seems unlikely that Twiverton will remain solidly Labour for very much longer. The rash of Swileys' 'Vote Labour!' posters acted as political acid in dissolving Labourist loyalties. The Conservative Party HQ on the London Road quickly cottoned on to the fact that the Swileys were a secret weapon, and if fewer than two posters were seen on display in prefab number twenty-five a batch of new super-sized ones were speedily delivered. Voters wearing red rosettes en route to cast a vote at the polling station would break down and sob if they caught sight of the forest of Swileys' 'Vote Labour!' posters. Other candidates sensed the chance to make a decisive breakthrough. (In the late 1950s and early 1960s these were Edgar Dickens - Bath Dickens Society stalwart and Liberal Party candidate, Edna Browning - recently knighted expert on trade union affairs from Tottenham and Conservative Party candidate, and Gilbert Youth of the World Government Party who - win or lose - would continue to hold his mild and bitter constituency surgeries in a number of local watering holes).
On each of the nine days of the 1926 General Strike copies of the Worker's Voice rolled off secret printing presses in railway arches on the Lower Bristol Road. One of its editorials
described Twiverton as "the linchpin of the 'proletarian red belt' of north-east Somerset, a hard-edged/soft water terrain inhabited by stone masons, cabinet makers, shop workers, solicitors' clerks, and domestic workers. Ghosts from its Chartist, Luddite, Leveller and Muggletonian past pace up and down its terraced streets." It is hard to see such Left political romanticism returning to Twiverton today (although history always likes to surprise.) The Conservative Party election victories of 1955 and 1959 signalled the emergence of what Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic in prefab number one likes to call "the effluent society." The concerns of the labourer in the prefab were pushed off the agenda of the political class, and those with terrapins in back gardens came into their own.

FIFTY-THREE

2010-01-27T11:12:00.006Z

It is hard to pin down the precise date when a group of us decided to "have a go!" at setting up a Prefab Philosophy Club. (The "have a go!" phrase was inspired by Wilfred Pickles, the folksy Yorkshireman who hosted the "Have a go, Joe!" BBC radio quiz broadcast which ran from 1946 to 1967).
One of the first projects of the Prefab Philosophy Club was to take a leaf out of Walter Benjamin's book and encourage residents to make "maps of their own lives." Benjamin's idea of "aura" had impressed us all. This was only to be expected since prefabs are saturated with a very distinctive aura or atmosphere of their own - and the idea of mapping out our own lives was made us appreciate this all the more. Here is Benjamin's own effort (he lived from 1892 - 1940) at sketching out his own 'life-map' in pre-First World War Berlin.

"I have evolved a system of signs, and on the grey background of such maps they would make a colourful show if I clearly marked in the houses of my friends and girl friends, the assembly halls of various collectives, from the 'debating chambers' of the Youth Movement to the gathering places of the Communist youth, the hotel and brothel rooms that I knew for one night, the decisive benches of the Tiergarten, the ways to different schools and the graves that I saw filled, the sites of prestigious cafes whose long-forgotten names daily crossed our lips, the tennis courts where empty apartment blocks stand today, and the halls emblazoned with gold and stucco that the terrors of dancing classes made almost the equal of gymnasiums."

This was the life-map conjured up by one of the members of the Prefab Philosophy Club (her nom de plume was Spinzoza Dice). What Walter Benjamin had done for pre-war 'Berlin'we would do for post-Second World War Twiverton!

"We have evolved a system of signs, and on the green background of such maps (laid out on the baize of subbuteo table football pitches) they make a colourful show. We have clearly marked in the prefabs of our friends and girl friends and our key gathering places. These include the 'jug and bottle' entrance to the 'My Full Moon' public house, the fish and chip shop run by Mr and Mrs Tobins, the open bedroom window of prefab number thirteen through which - on one quite unforgetable occasion - a young lady dressed only in her swimming costume gave us a friendly wave, the kerbstone on the corner of Woodhedge Road where we sat and pondered our futures, the bendy tree in the 'wooly bed' in Pennyquick Wood, the not-over-prestigious cafe hut in the football ground, the playing field that stands on top of the old coalmine, the secret pathway to the Gothic turrets of Brunel's railway tunnel, and the green emblazoned with daisies and buttercups on which the dazzling prowess of our sporting skills would be displayed to an awestruck world.

FIFTY-TWO

2010-01-16T12:12:00.014Z

For all of 'Tubby' Lard's faults, it has to be said that he was the inspiration behind the setting up of the Prefab Philosophy Club. He started everything off by asking: "So why should supporting a football clun called Bristol Rovers have a claim to moral superiority over supporting a football club called Bristol City?"
When news of our Prefab Philosophy Club first got out the number of people who were asking the council to re-house them further away from the declined, while the number asking to move into the prefabs increased! The chap who works for the Admiralty who keeps a terrapin - a freshwater turtle - in his back garden in Camelot Green was seen doubling up with laughter when he was told that a seminar on Immanuel Kant was being held in Woodhedge Road. It was only after Nina Chapmain told him it was a "categorical imperative" that he attend the next one (Nina must have been one of the first Twivertonians to get to Cambridge) that the terrapin-like smirk vanished from his "So the prefabs Kant get enough of Kant!" face.
Some members of the Philosophy Club take part in the wireless football results rota on Saturday afternoons. There is always a short quiz before the results are broadcast at five o'clock. 'Tubby' Lard always finds a killer question to floor everyone. "Which language was spoken in seventh century Edinburgh?" was an especially memorable one. (It was Welsh - the Welsh-speaking Goddodin tribe was living in Edinburgh at this time.)
The football results would be listened to in almost complete silence - at least until the ones from the Scottish Football League came on. This all changed in 1958 when a Scottish international called Charlie 'Cannonball' Fleming was signed by Bath City. The one time East Fife and Sunderland player scored fifty goals in one season! Soon the Prefab Philosophy Club was planning a conference on Adam Smith, David Hume, and Adam Ferguson. 'Tubby' Lard (who used to shout out "Who on earth are Stenhousemuir!" as soon as the Scottish results came on) became a fervent follower of the club held the Scottish Qualifying Cup trophy aloft in 1902. When 'Cannonball' was in Bath we would all be on tenterhooks as we waited to hear the result of Partick Thistle brushing against the Heart of Midlothian and prepared our research papers on the impact of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment.

FIFTY-ONE

2010-01-03T11:18:00.012Z

Jokes told in public houses in the 1950s would often start with the words: "There was an Englishman, a Welshman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman." Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud's book on the Psychopathology of Everyday Life (page 161 of the 1938 Pelican edition) explains what is going on by pointing to the following quotation:

Goethe said of Lichtenberg:
"Where he cracks a joke, there lies a concealed problem."

Underlying all the "There was an Englishman, a Welshman, an Irishman and a Scotsman" jokes was a frantic bid at relieving the tensions that are part and parcel of living under a multi-national state. It was only thanks to the mutal tolerance of Englishmen, Welshmen, Irishmen and Scotsmen that the United Kingdom had survived at all.
Scotsmen were strangely absent from the old man's drinking circles, and this could have been partly because of the tyranny of distance. Scotland seemed a heck of a long way from Somerset. Getting from South Wales to Somerset only took a couple of hours. Even Dublin was just an overnight ferry trip and a train ride away. There was a feeling that Glasgow was a place just to the south of Iceland.
Although the "There was an Englishman, a Welshman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman" jokes always seemed to be well received, the laughter which followed them always felt a shade contrived. As could also be the case with some of the passages of Professor Dr. Sigmund's Freud's famous book, it could be impossible to make heads or tales of what they really meant.

FIFTY

2009-12-30T14:00:00.016Z

My father attended the same elementary school in Pentwyn as Roy Jenkins, the prominent Labour Party politician. These two led parallel lives. Both spent some time in 'Oxford'. Roy's 'Oxford' included the university's Bodleian Library, my father's 'Oxford' included the Cowley car factory on the other side of town.
The old man's father made the timber supports which prevented the roofs of the coal mine he worked in from caving in. If his workmanship had not been up to scratch Roy Jenkins' father might have come to grief and the future Home Secretary would never have been born. Miners would lift up their hands from deep inside the bowels of theearth and imagine they could touch flowers on the hillside above.
When he was young Roy Jenkins' father went off to Paris in search of a life of freedom. But his money ran out and he was compelled to return to work dow the mines. He became a union official (and was briefly jailed during the 1926 General Strike), was elected to Parliament. His family was able to employ a maid, and Roy Jenkins junior was sent to school wearing a silk suit. (A big mistake as he had mud thrown at him by the other boys.)
On Sundays the Jenkins family would drive out to a quiet market town for lunch in a smart hotel. Roy began to acquire a liking for claret and a taste for the more sensual side of bourgeois life.
For the old man (but never for Roy Jenkins) public houses were part of the weft and warp of daily life. Pubs functioned as seminar rooms, job centres, accommodation bureaus, and porticos into the abbyss. .
In 1950s Bath I would be sat down on the stairs of a Twiverton inn and wait to have supplies of ginger beer, Cheddar Cheese Straws - and even a pickled egg! - ferried up to my regal throne.

"The ae house is the key to every town" - Walter Benjamin.

FORTY-NINE

2009-12-27T12:14:00.019Z

'Tubby' Lard (resident of prefab number seven) has been known to wobble in his loyalties. Two years ago he was an unshakeable supporter of Bristol Rovers - "the aesthetics of their blue and white quartered shirts are so captivating!" Then he switched to Bristol City after they had beaten Rovers in the local derby match -"City's Ashton Gate ground does not have any of the horrible gasworks' smells that you always get at Eastville." Then - in the twinkle of any eye - he was seen walking aound showing off his new Bristol Rovers' scarf after the club's sensational
4 - 0 victory over Manchester United in the FA Cup! ("The way the Rovers' supporters sang 'Irene, Goodnight Irene' was so moving!") When challenged to justify this disgraceful turn-coat conduct 'Tubby' had the gall to quote the retort made by Winston Churchill in 1900. Having deserted the Conservative Party for the Liberal Party Churchill then re-joined the Conservative Party. "To rat is one thing" he said,"but to re-rat is something special."
Tony Taverner (known as 'Skirton' to his friends) is the footballing hero of Twiverton. He started off playing in the Somerset Youth League with Whiteway Canaries. After being spotted by a Hereford United he finally hit the big time with Manchester City and Arsenal. Every football album of any quality has a photograph of the ball slipping through the fingers pf the Arsenal goalkeeper in the 1927 F.A. Cup Final. (Cardiff City won the match by a goal to nil.)
No local player has been signed by Gateshead, a club which plays in the Third Division (North). Perhaps it is because prefabs foster a 'support the underdog' complex which explains why a number of us follow the fortunes of this supremely unfashionable club. It was 'Auntie' Ivy's brother, 'Uncle' Stan (who always gives us a wave when he is cutting the grass at the junior school) who first told us about Gateshead F.C. He married a girl from Jarrow, a town which is just up the road from Gateshead. Whenever we saw her she always looked very pale and thin. She had left her home town when it was hit by the depression in the 1930s. Her two children were quite young when she died, and whenever the Gateshead result comes on the wireless we find ourselves thinking of her.

FORTY-EIGHT

2009-12-20T13:17:00.016Z

Despite winning nearly a quarter of a million fewer votes than the Labour Party, the Conservative Party triumphed in the general election of 1951. Harold Macmillan was the new Minister of Housing. His aim was to build a record number of houses - and build them he did! In 1954 no less than three hundred and fifty-four thousand new homes went up! Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one got hold a copy of Macmillan's The Middle Way (written in 1938) and recommended it to the old man. The hard-faced Conservatism of the 1930s had taken a back seat.
Go back in your time machine from anty time between the late 1950s and the early 1960s and you would have seen Major Lansdowne - a sad-eyed figure with a droopy Harold Macmillan-style moustache - selling copies of the "Daily Worker!" The Major also believed in The Middle Way - although his was half way between Lenin and Keir Hardie. On Saturday mornings he would snip open his bundle of Daily Workers and get ready for the rush to buy. The amazing thing about Major Lansdown's selling technique was that by the end of the afternoon only one or two copies of the Daily Worker would be left, and yet no one was ever seen buying one. Supporters of the Fourth International sometimes shouted "It's Comrade Rigor Mortis!" and Cyril Connolly once stood in front of him and recited his poem about "classes and masses and masses of asses!" One letter writer to the Bath & Wilting said he disagreed with everything Major Lansdowne stood for but applauded his "indefatigable spirit." He also pointed out that it was a tactical error to stand outside the very building where - until 1954 - the masses had queued with their ration books. "The hidden semiotic message of selling Daily Workers on this spot is that socialism = rationing, which is spot on!"
Most of the shoppers ignored Major Lansdowne completely, but now and again a fierce discussion would break out. Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic said the paper had made a serious mistake by claiming that religion had been described by Marx as "the opium of the masses." "This is a mistranslation. Marx said religion is the opiate of the masses. It dulls the pain of life under capitalism which is what shopping and television does today." In 1963 a group of youthful sellers of the agit-prop newsletter Neither Moscow or Washington but Twiverton! tried to muscle in on the Major's Daily Worker patch, but he would have none of it and with some friendly police assistance ended up winning the day.
After peaking at 102,780 votes in 1945 support for the British Communist Party melted away. The revival in the party's vote in the early sixties - it edged back to 62,112 in 1966 - proved to be a false Morning Star. The spirit of the age was not just turning against Major Lansdowne's party. It was turning against prefabs as well. Prefab estates became niche constructions for the discerning few. Most people wanted to live in Middle Way. Everyone has a car and a patio in Middle Way. No one looks scruffy in Middle Way. You never see anyone like Major Lansdowne in Middle Way!

FORTY-SEVEN

2009-12-10T13:47:00.018Z

"Putting on the agony. Putting on the style. That is what the young folk are doing all the while." The lyrics of Lonnie Donnegan's hit-song of 1957 might even have been composed in a prefab. Prefab dwellers always knew they had lots of things going for them - gardens, functionality, mod-cons, a relaxed mode of being... But as the years went by they began to feel they were being put on the back foot when it came to style. Style is intrinsically elusive and hard to pin down. During our kerbstone debates some felt it was "a vivid design that no one has thought of before." (This was the view of Ann Brown-Sloane in prefab number forty-eight.) Others (notably Len Sullivan of prefab number thirty-three) believed it was "a novel way of expressing the spirit of the age." Late in the evening 'Tubby' Lard stormed off after coming out with the stinging rebuke that we had become all form and no content and that all the talk about style was "sadly symptomatic of the growing narcissism of our time."
Even 'Tubby' agreed that the new light green 5A buses -the ones which ferried Twivertonians
back and forth into town - had plenty of style. Their style oozed from every oily crevice. The buses' engines hummed with the smooth authority of Daimler cars. Just as people who have problems end up spending their free-time with other people who have problems, so stylish icons of culture end up being drawn to other stylish icons of culture. No stylish Nymph Venuses in blue jeans had ever been seen at the local bus stop waiting for the old 5A bus, but as soon as the first new 5A bus was die to arrive whole squads of them materialised from nowhere. "We just had to give the new bus's soft-padded squelching seats a sensual try!" one of them was heard to say.
The excitement generated by the new buses and blue jeans knocked 'Tubby' Lard off balance. He was determined to show the Nymph Venuses that when it came to operating the 5A bus's magical finger-touch bells he was the quickest in the west. Those accompanying 'tubby' pn his first trip on the new bus had an ominous feeling that he would prematurely eject his finger in a most unstylish way - and prematurely eject he did. The new streamlined light green 5 A bus was brought to a shuddering brake-screeching halt only having just pulled away from the previous bus stop. Jumping the gun was one thing, but this gun was still fast asleep. The brakes were applied with such vigour that one of the Nymph Venuses almost fell out of her soft-padded sensual seat. "I didn't want (cough) to get off the bus (cough) quite yet! (cough)" 'Tubby' whispered to the ferocious looking driver (who seemed poised to prematurely eject 'Tubby' Lard' from his first ride on the stylish new bus.) 'Tubby' sensed that his heinous finger-touching folly was going to be the talk of the bus passengers for the rest of the ride into town. When it
reached the final stop by the Abbey next to the 'Water is best' fountain the harsh leson had been learnt that the arrival of a stylish bus does not mean that a stylish bus driver has arrived as well. Opposites do attract sometimes.
By 1959 more and more prefabs were acquiring a lacklustre look. Their once sharply defined edges had been blunted, water butts were sprouting minor leaks, and the corrugated coalhouses no longer had lost their celebrated honey-hued look. Lawns and hedges were covered with a dew of restlessness, and strangers in grey raincoats were seen taking black-bound notepads from their pockets and jotting down estimates of the prefabs' scrap value.

FORTY-SIX

2009-12-06T13:42:00.023Z

Rationing ended in 1954 and the Consumer Society arrived a couple of years later. It arrived when a vending machine was installed in the village. This vending machine did not dispense mouldy old bars of chocolate or packets of Woodbine cigarettes. It dispensed ultra-fresh cartons of strawberry flavoured milk! Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number could not wait to put a coin in it. (He had mistaken it for the vending machines that were to be installed in the streets of Moscow which delivered bottles of vodka wrapped in brown paper bags!)
There was more to the Consumer Society than cartons of strawberry flavoured milk. Hard on the heels of vending machines came bars of white chocolate! (The Swiss had been tucking into this delicacy since the 1930s!) After shoving his way to the front of white chocolate queue 'Bully Boy' Brown of Shores Way was seen puking up in the gutter. ('Bully Boy' Brown's life was to show that sometimes there is a relationship between character and fate.) The pace of change taking place from 1956 on was given another accelerated boost when Bath City football club signed a player from the Continent who had a sun tan, a stylish haircut, and did overhead kicks!
A slick, press-buttoned, Meteor Jet-filled sky of a future was juggernauting and sonic booming its way towards us. It was filled bumper to bumper with a hunger for things, for Formica table tops, three-piece suites, Hoovers, hula-hoops, jukeboxes, electric irons, washing machines, Italian-style suits and winkelpicker shoes. The quiet repose that was prefab estate life would soon be over.

FORTY-FIVE

2009-11-28T12:48:00.013Z

Press the reverse button of your time travel machine (they must have been invented by now!), go back to the year 1953, and you will see that the window ledges on the front of our prefab have been draped with three Union Jack flags. The most any other prefab on the estate could muster was two!
Mantelpieces are chock-a-block with Coronation memorabilia. Not just commemorative Coronation spoons, commemorative Coronation knives and commemorative Coronation trays -but commemorative Coronation mugs as well. "Mugs with mugs!" was the catchphrase of members of the Oliver Cromwell Society who met up at the Hat and Feather on the London Road. In the 1930s theatrical types and claimants to the throne always headed for this public house. (The hat and feathers had once been the insignia of the Cavaliers.)
By the end of June 1953 there was hardly a five year old in the country who could not spell 'Coronation' and draw a coronet as well. Canny captains of industry re-branded their mints, sofas, lollies, and evaporated milk as Coronation mints, Coronation sofas, Coronation lollies, and Coronation evaporated milk. Barbers would say "Any Coronation items for the week-end, sir?"
A month earlier, in May 1953, we crowded into 'Tubby' Lard's sitting-room to watch the television broadcast of Blackpool's 4-3 Cup Final win over Bolton Wanderers. Stanley Mortensen (whose career was to reach an even greater climax when he joined Bath City) scored a hat-trick.
Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest (someone claimed they carried a Bath Bun in their knapsack) and in 1956 an ex-Bath schoolboy - Roger Bannister - ran the mile in under four minutes.
We can now see that the period from May 1953 to May 1954 was the zenith of classical prefab civilization. Historians call it 'Prefabnia Extraordinus'. Yet no commemorative memorabilia were ever made for prefabs. Not a single plate or spoon - let alone a mug - was ever made to commemorate them. No captain of industry ever had the iconic symbol of a prefab printed on one of his products. No barber ever tactfully asked a customer if they needed "any Prefabs for the week-end?" Even in their Indian Summer of the early 1950s prefabs' exuded an absent presence.

FORTY-FOUR

2009-11-21T13:41:00.015Z

Our prefab has five rooms, or six if you include the hall. Most other houses seem to have more, so it is no wonder that prefab dwellers have long been fascinated by the Biblical line "My Father's House has many rooms." ('Tubby' Lard's unorthodox reading of the text is that the Almighty works in the hotel industry.)
The front of Bath Abbey is dominated by two sculptures of Jacob's Ladder. The angels are shown flapping their wings in an upward ascent towards the heavenly heights. Look more carefully and you will notice that a couple of angels have lost their footing and are tumbling down the hierarchy of virtue. This is what happens if you go astray.
Hierarchies are everywhere, and that includes prefab estates. Take no notice of those who say prefab residents are all roughly (and they mean roughly) of the same status. The slick salesman who lives in the immaculate corner prefab says "au contraire!" This is someone who is never seen wearing the standard prefab string vest or drinking out of the standard prefab bottle of pale ale. His evenings are spent listening to Bach and mulling over the ideological differences between Jacobins and Jacobites. It was no wonder he was offended by the photo-journalist from the 'style section' of the New Yorker who published a picture of him in his sitting-room armchair under the headline "A British trailer-trash interior."
Working out just where our own prefab stands on the estate's Jacob's Ladder hierarchy is a tricky exercise. The old man only has one string vest, and has never had much of a liking for bottles of pale ale. When there has been plenty of work with Derro Enamels life in prefab number twenty-four looks "rather good" (a favourite phrase.) If there is a long work-less spell at home life gets less predictable. When the old man returned home after an exacting debate on the impact of inflation on living standards in the Golden Fleece he collided with the front gate (it has never been the same since) and our Capability Brown-style light green speckled hedge started looking a shade forlorn. Passing by Bath Abbey a week later I noticed that one of the falling angels had slipped down another rung.

FORTY-THREE

2009-11-15T12:18:00.017Z

The catchy slogan of Twiverton Baptist Church in the 1950s was "Fight truth decay!" Potential true believers were enticed through its portal by blandishments of coloured drawing paper, crayons, rubbers, and - this was perhaps the clincher - aromatic bottles of glue.
"They have gone to the other one!" a miffed recruiter from Saint Michael Is No Angel was told at prefab number twenty-four when an entire squad - yes, an entire squad! - defected to the Methodists after news got out that chocolate cakes and lemonade were to be included in its Sunday School largesse. Never before in the history of Christain theology had so many treats been bestowed in return for listening to such slender morsels of divinely revealed doctrine.
Friedrich Engels noted that people are to be judged "by what they do and not by what they say." (Which makes judgements about Engels himself - who was at one and the same time a
revolutionary communist and a Manchester textiles capitalist - a shade tricky.) The cigarette cards and cakes handed out by Twiverton's competing Sunday Schools had a very ephemeral impact. What really impressed the local population was the fact that not a single Twiverton Sunday School teacher's name ever appeared on the list of criminal convictions published by the Bath & Wilting. ("Married Sunday School teachers were a different kettle of fish" Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic would say in a witty aside.)
Towards the end of the 1950s religious observance in Twiverton went into decline and its "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" was heard as clearly here as it had been on Dover Beach. Although in its formative years some New Testament texts had been wilfully given a sinister
anti-Jewish edge (thereby implicating Christianity in all kinds of atrocities culminating in those of the twentieth century) the narrative of the slaves' heroic struggle for human dignity against the merciless power of Rome remained a great source of ethical inspiration to Twivertonians.

FORTY-TWO

2009-11-08T13:38:00.012Z

Just down the road from the prefabs was Saint Michael (Is No Angel) church. Michael was the 'top dog' archangel whose most important job was to stand up for the people of Israel. Given what happened to the people of Israel in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s you start to have doubts as to whether this 'top dog' archangel was all he was cracked up to be.
Church of England Sunday School meetings in Twiverton never went on for too long and always ended with a treat. A hallowed tradition in the 1950s was the vicar assistant's solemn and much appreciated closing ceremony of handing out cigarette cards of tanks and fighter planes and various other gruesome instruments of war. "Any means necessary to win over young Christian soldiers!" would be the peace loving vicar's assistant's cheery words.
Bert Downhill was coaxed out of his marathon Sunday morning kips in prefab number nineteen by the rumours of cigarette card largesse. Reg went on to be confirmed in Saint Michael's and at one point there was even talk of his being granted a place on the coveted front row pew! The coveted front row pew had a pedigree which went back into tims immemorial. It was a place on the coveted front road pew which assured the gentry that the established social order remained secure. Although Bert would one day go (there is no other way of putting it) downhill - the Englishcombe Village cider house has a lot to answer for - no one would ever forget the time he came within a hair's breadth of taking his place on the coveted front row pew.
Take a stroll through the tranquil grounds of Saint Michael (part Saxon/part Norman/and part D-I-Y) and you will almost feel touched by the balm of Gilead. While many of the inscriptions on the gravestones have been eroded by the biting west wind, there is one which refuses to be bowed by the passage of time. For one time residents of Twiverton's prefab estates it has come to act as a lodestar which guides them through the travails of life.

"Behold I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye therefore wise as serpents and innocent as doves." (Matthew 10:16).

Poets inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke (especially his 'Ever Again' verse about resting "Among flowers. Facing the sky") wander towards this churchyard at dusk. This is where intimations of the future can be heard being whispered through the trees.

FORTY-ONE

2009-10-29T08:37:00.014Z

Perhaps it was historically inevitable, but the inevitable can still take you by surprise! A crack squad from Duck's Son and Winker (the west country's top media firm) has fixed an aerial on to the coalhouse roof. At first all you could see on the television screen was a misty blur of swirling dots and slow-motion dancing shadows. This was followed by a shape which resembled the grinning face of Mr Sliley next door poking out his tongue and wriggling his ears. When all seemed lost -and with Duck's Son and Winker poised to call it a day - there was a cry of 'ignition!' and our television picture burst into crystal clear clarity. That was when the radiant face of Lady Isobel Barnett made its elegant entrance into our star-struck sitting-room for the very first time.
The departure of my brother for Australia had created an emptiness that had to be filled. The TV set provided gave aus a sense of ersartz consolation. It was tinged with a residue of guilt: maybe he would have stayed here longer if our new entertainment complex had been in place.
Hoisting a television aerial up on your coalhouse roof is like waying a "We have joined the mainstream!" flag. Admittedly our flag looks almsot at half-mast. It takes just half a second to tell whether a household's aerial can pick up both the ITV and the BBC channels. So it was historically inevitable that within a few minutes of our brave new TV aerial flag being unfurled to the world one of the Slileys would lean out of his window and say: "Only got one channel then!"
Getting one had been a giant step for us - but in a fast-moving Consumer Society the goalposts keep on changing.
The old wireless life still lives on, especially in the early and late hours. The other night we were captiavted by a broadcast about a brash and super-confident American tycoon. The interviewer
asked him to spell out the key qualities that are needed to achieve business success. His two line answer penetrated the easy-going languor of our prefab like a cool icicle of unwelcome realism. "You must remember one thing" he said. (There was a brief pause which served to heighten the impact of the brash and super-confident tycoon's message. What a salesman this guy was!)

"Everything in this life revolves around the intelligent pursuit of self-interest!"

Not in this prefab, buster!

FORTY

2009-10-24T12:37:00.013+01:00

Going up to the Protter's place in Downie Combe before 1962 was great fun. There was football in the yard, table tennis, sparring matches with real boxing gloves, and general larking around! Then - in the twinkling of an eye - it all changed. And the eye that twinkled was to be found in the corner of the Protters' sitting-room. Everything changed the moment the Protters got one! And this was not just a Protter phenomenon. Whole swathes of the country changed the moment people got one! The hunger for getting one seemed to get completely out of control. One day time itself willhave to be re-designated anew. Instead of BC or BCE (Before the Common Era)
BTV (Before TeleVision) will become a new parameter of time, and ATV (After TeleVision) will send Anno Domini and ACE packing.
The triumph of the 'great indoors' in the 1960s was not a pretty sight. Curtains started to be drawn at five o'clock on bright Summer days. (This was code for "Keep Away! - We Prefer Our Goggle Box's Company To Yours!".) If your luck is in and you gain admittance into the darkened inner sanctum the Glazed Eyes of the Newly Dead will not offer any welcome. You will be tol to remain mute, and if this rule is broken a rush of shushes and hisses will make it clear that you have overstayed your 'welcome'. When you take your leave and bid a fond farewell to your dlightful hosts their leaden eyelids will barely register the sweet sorrow of your tip-toed departure.
By 1962 the "when are you getting one?" question had winged its way into every street in the land. Soon nine of of ten ATV households would be spending night after night surfing along on the Big Wave of Electronic Change. For a brief while a small band of rebels on Prefab Estate Island pledged to stay in their BTV wireless lifeboats. This was ditched overboard as soon as a critical mass of Newtin Road prefabs had gone out and got one. The slick salesman in the corner prefab had amazed everyone by going out and getting one back in 1954! 'Tubby' Lard's 'dark horse' family was not all that far behind. Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic suddenly stopped quoting his favourite line from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty about refusing "to bow the knee" to convention and could barely hide his joy when he told his next door neighbour that "he was getting one." The phrase "Did you listen to...?" was hardly heard anymore, even if The Goons (going strong since 1950) had been on the night before. Those without one feel like disenfranchised serfs washed up from the Middle Ages.
The "when are you going to get one?" question was never going to go away. It would prowl around the woods in the middle of the night, paces back and forth up the fron path at mid-day, poke its shiny screened dot-filled face through front windows of wireless only sitting rooms, and give out blasts of phoney synthetic pseudo-laughter and ecstatic audience applause from inside the coalhouses of TV-less households. One one occasion it prodded its long silver aerial up our letter-box. Wireless-only households could see that they were completely surrounded. They knew that the atmosphere of intimidation would never let up. The Big Question Of The Day
would follow your bus home and leap out of the rent man's and milkman's and postman's lips. It was whispered in the barber's shop if no other customers were there. It might have been possible to evade it back in 1955 - but there was no evading it now. Even the birds circling above the prefab roofs were starting to screech it out: "When the heck are you going to get one!"

THIRTY-NINE

2009-10-18T14:46:00.023+01:00

The 1950s could be generous times. For example we loaned our bike - our prefab's only bike - to the charitable cause of the Protters of Downie Combe. In way of celebrating the very first pay cheque the old man received from Derro Enamels my mum bought an all but new pram for Mrs Downhill of prefab number nineteen.
The Protters' own spirit of generosity came to an abrupt end in 1962. Prior to this watershed year - if anyone on our estate was to fall on hard times with their kitchen cupboard being Spam-less and bare - the Protters would be sure to come to the rescue. Who will forget the time when they used one of their free British Railways travel passes to take 'Ossie' oster on a day trip to Devon and buy him ham and tomato sandwiches in Dawlish's famed Black Horse public house!
Perhaps Downie Combe had something to do with the shift in the Protters' mood. Located on a hillside some six miles south-east of Twiverton, Downuie Combe has come to be a cultural weather vane of the shifting Zeitgeist of the age. It was from 1962 on that more and more Downie Combe-ites found themselves residing in two-income households which began to ooze novel amounts of surplus cash. this was even noticed by the editor of the Bath & Wilting: "A spirit of possessive individualism is edging its furtive way intothis community's once fraternal enclaves." A freshly painted sign erected by the International Situationists said "Welcome to Look-After-Number-One-Ville". "It gives a new sense of tone to the neighbourhood" declared a local councillor who was full of admiration for its mix of brown and blue paints.
Iy was in 1962 that Don 'the angler' Protter vowed never again to use any of his free British Railways' travel passes for causes other than his own. Soon he was bragging that "he had never been seen drunk by any of his kids." His youngest son moved to Belfast and joined a group of 'born again' evangelists. "All genocides are the Almighty's way of punishing sinners" was their distinctive ideological line.
Stroll up to the Protters' old abode in Downie Combe and you can still see our old prefab bike rusting away in their back yard.

THIRTY-EIGHT

2009-10-12T12:26:00.019+01:00

After watching two episodes of an American TV series called Perry Mason 'Ossie' Oster of prefab number seventeen was inspired to apply for a job as a trainee common law clerk at King Sized & Withering Fees, a firm of Solicitors and Commissioners for All Kinds of Oaths . Kids from the estate who went to East Hill gravitated towards jobs in garages and butchers' shops, while kids who went to Weymouth House Technical School acquired an aversion for anything that was 'technical' and tried to became Admiralty or insurance clerks. The high-flying grammar school son of the slick salesman on the corner prefab started to make some discrete inquiries about vacancies for Viceroys in the remaining colonial dependencies and openings on the board of Coutts' Bank. Those of an adventurous temperament responded to advertisements placed in the press by the Hong Kong Police Department (GCE English and 5'7" height were key requirements.)
There had once been a time when young prefab dwellers were tactfully advised to keep their prefab dwelling residence a closely guarded secret when applying for an 'office type' job. That was before Gary Bollard of Woodhedge Road made his astonishing breakthrough. Quite out of the blue he was offered the prestigious post (albeit temporary) of 'roving arts correspondent' with the Walcot & Bath Arts and Literary Festival. (His talents as a ukulele player swung the interviewing panel his way.) Once embarked on this glittering career the phrase "walls of the mind" was never far from Gary's lips. He would explain that - while East Berliners had recently found themselves imprisoned by a real wall which divided their city - residents of our prefab estate were prone to imprison themselves behind a self-made wall of class segregation. While his 'roving arts correspondent' post lasted for five all too brief Spring and Summer months, Gary's upbeat temperament was a source of inspiration to us all. He had an unshakeable conviction that what he called "human agency" could overcome the most formidable of social barriers. This conviction stayed with him for the rest of his working life. (Or in Gary's case for the rest of his non-working life, since he has ended up setting a new Twiverton record in the number of years spent signing on at the Ministry of Labour.)
At around the same time as Gary was roving around the Walcot & Bath art world a resident of prefab number seventeen was trying to break into journalism. Despite being a school friend of Dawk 'the print' Goodall - the son of a wheeler dealer in the local media industry - his hoped-for interview with the Bath & Wilting failed to materialise. Plan A had to be abandoned, and Plan B - joining the merchant navy - was soon abandoned as well. (His four GCE passes did not include maths, and this was a key requirement.) Fortunately Plan C - being given a time slot at the paint-peeling pockmarked Ministry of Labour building in Avon Street - was their for the taking.
Back in the eighteenth century recurring plagues of cholera had afflicted Avon Street. It was therefore seen as an ideal location for a Ministry of Labour office. Plan C did not fail, and the young resident of prefab number seventeen was soon starting work as a 'trainee manager' with the Devizes branch of the Tread On Simpson footware chain. After being infected with the itchy feet syndrome (a perennial problem in this line of work) he signed up for a ten pound passage to Australia.

THIRTY-SEVEN

2009-10-08T10:39:00.014+01:00

After months of back-breaking-sweat-filled-enamel-furnace-bricklaying on the Continent
("Harwich for the continent and Frinton for the incontinent" was the jest of this era) the old man
returns home for some well-earned rest.

"Sleeping is no mean art: you need to stay awake all day to do it." (F.Nietzsche).
(Not when you have been labouring away in enamel furnaces.)

The back garden would have been lulled into the deepest of sleeps during the long weeks of the old man's absence. On his return it had no inkling of the ferocious rate of digging that was poised to overwhelm it. Even seconds before a frenzied demented attack was launched by the spade and fork pincer movement the forest of foliage, weeds and dandelions would still be idly swaying nonchalantly to and fro in the breeze without a worry in the world.
Within two or three days the soil would have been turned over, plumb-lined rows of potatoes and cabbages set in place, and the ash-filled garden path firmed up. With the prefab's rear returned to its "ship-shape and Bristol fashion" grandeur the telescopic lens of the oldman's advance battalion turned to eye up the garden in the front. The first casualties would be the lawn and prefab number seventeen's famous light green speckled hedge. Both would receive the
"take-no-prisoners short-back-and sides' treatment" (known locally as a 'Ray Rosewarn' after Twiverton's most celebrated and most politically informed barber.)
The prolific work-rate of the old man evokes awestruck admiration. "So that is why he got that Derro Enamels job!" people would mutter. (Going from fourteen year old coalminer to hotel expenses paid international bricklayer represented an epic feat of social mobility.) It never took long before the name of Alexey Stakhanov sprang from people's lips. Stakhanov was the Hero of Socialist Labour whose world historic feat was to mine 227 tons of coal in a single shift in Russia in 1937. This made such an impact that his beaming features were to appear on the cover of Time Magazine. No such plaudits would ever be bestowed on the prefabs' Jack Morgan. And yet - as any dispassionate observer of the semi-miraculous transformation of our prefab's back garden will be the first to tell you - he was clearly up there in the Alexey Stakhanov super-productive worker aristocracy league.
With the feats of heroic labour completed the old man puts on his American movie Humphrey Bogarte-style hat and catch the 5A bus into town. The first port of call is the plush bank in Milsom Street - the one with the elegant ceiling which is lined with chandeliers. This is where a near-empty wallet will be filled to the brim with ten shilling and one pound notes. The second port of call will be one of Bath's fine "Wine of the Gods!" drinking haunts. (There will be no third port of call.) After arduous weeks of labour, of dark nights of proletarian exile, of aching muscles and mountains of bricks, of days filled with sweat and cement dust, of evenings caressed with lonely thoughts of home, an interlude has arrived which was to be sweetly savoured.
The old man strides into Smith's Wine Vaults, salutes the landlord, invites him to "have one on me", lights up a Dutch cigar, and begins to celebrate the joys of his resurrected prefab life.

THIRTY-SIX

2009-10-06T12:50:00.015+01:00

George Rotinoff was known as "the Isambard Kingdom Brunel of prefab engineering." He used his shipbuilding expertise to design a the 'New Model' prefab. This had all kinds of jazzy accessories: sinks with double drainers, dry goods cupboards, and drop-flat tables. You name it, George Rotinoff's 'New Model Prefab' had it! - apart from spheres.
It was R. Buckminster Fuller who designed the sphere-shaped prefab, and he first put it on display in a Chicago department store in 1929. Some people immediately said: "We have seen the pre-fabricated future - and it is round!" In 1949 Buckminster Fuller took the world by storm once again when his lightweight aluminium geodesic Wichita House went on show.
Art college students spend endless hours debating whether form or function, beauty or utility, should be the dominant principle of design. The prefab truth is that you can have both. "Form follows function!" is the philosophy which underlies our 'AIROH Aluminium' prefabs. Seeing how the coalhouses and water butts stand guard like heroic sentinels can take your breath away.
The homeless people of the world are crying out for somewhere to live. Some people say that prefabs - whether rectangular or geodesic - have had their day as a policy answer to this urgent social question. When Zhou Enlai of the Chinese Communist Party was asked to give his assessment of the legacy of the French Revolution he said "It is too early to say." It is the same with the prefabs.

THIRTY-FIVE

2009-09-30T14:49:00.021+01:00

The evolution of prefabs took a great leap forward in 1830. A London carpenter - H. John Manning - made some pre-cut (pre-fabricated) pieces of timber. These were then stored on board the ship his son took to Australia and assembled into the 'Manning Portable Colonial Cottage' on arrival. Another New World boost to prefab evolution came sixty years later when self-assembly prefab packs were posted off to 'I can if Yukon!" prospectors in the Klondike.
These were the inspiration for the Sears Roebuck & Co. 'prefabs by mail order' business that was set up in 1908 and survived for another thirty-two years.
The 1950s was the hey-day of the Saturday morning film matinee. Young doubles of Roy Rodgers, the Lone Ranger, and Hopalong Cassidy would be seen waiting in ambush for Copper Jones. (Only to flee and hurl their silver six-guns away should this awesome figure ever
appear out of the blue and start cycling towards them.) The Rebel Without A Cause who lived at prefab number twenty-six would never dream of stepping out of his front door without first putting on his stylish Wyatt Earp-style bootlace tie. As a young boy he would set up his train-set in the front garden, play quietly away for hours, and avoid any rough games on the greens. Then he caught sight of a teddy boy walking by, decided to become one himself, had a big row with his
parents, and the day after his sixteenth birthday was never seen on the estate again.
German Enlightenment thinkers described architecture as frozen music. If you could de-frost a 1950s prefab it would unleash the pulsating beat of Frankie Lane's Rawhide! If you tried
de-frosting one of the prefabs on our estate in the months before they were demolished a melancholy heart-wrenching Mahler symphony would overwhelm you.

THIRTY-FOUR

2009-09-25T13:41:00.029+01:00

When our class was told we would have to stay behind for an extra hour and chant 'good idea' none of us thought it was a good ideal. How could we have known that what was a "good ideal" in Somerset was known as a "good idea" in more respectable parts of the country! (Of course those who went round our estate saying "Plato had some good ideals" could not be faulted.)
'Tubby' Lard - resident of prefab number seven - made a big stand about having to be made to learn RSE ('Received Standard English'.) Hardly a school day would go by without him muttering "Received By Whom?" under his breath.
A few days after the Soviet Union sent its Sputnik satellite into space in October 1957 a new word rocketed its way into our local lingo: prefabnik. This was not (as was first thought) a slur implying a liking for illegally taking other people's goods by prefab dwellers. The Dictionary Of Prefab Argot explains that it simply means "a person who has resided in a prefab for a number of years." A prefab (or fabpre as the cider drinkers up in Englishcombe Village prefer to call it) is defined as a "a pale low-slung sprout-topped detached bungalow typically made of steel, asbestos, and plaster board. After blazing a meteor-like way across the night sky of the 1940s it never won the cultural or aesthetic recognition it deserved."
(Go to the Dictionary's technical appendix and you will find that a prefab weighs almost a ton and covers nearly a thousand square feet of floor space. A gang with a crane was able to erect a prefab in two or three days. (When the first prefabs were being constructed in Twiverton the watching crowd was heard to cry out: "What an erection!")
Prefabs do not just have walls and a roof. They have a bath and inside toilet, an airing cupboard, and a kitchen with a refrigerator and an electric cooker. This should be enough for anyone. Dai 'Pascal' Lectic (a cousin of the resident of prefab number one) says "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a prefab room alone"
On frost-bitten mornings when an icy wind is lashing the delicate skin of our thin-walled dwellings residents have to spring into action. Prefabs in winter do not warm themselves up! Sir Robert Scott's British Antartica Expedition of 1912 showed people how to die in war. Prefabs in winter show people how to live in a cold climate. Just watch the finesse with which prefabniks hop down their back steps, unlatch the coal shed doors, shovel coal supplies into their buckets, zoom back into the sitting-rooms, clean out the grates and remove the ashes of the previous day, deposit them on their back garden paths, deftly place wood into an optimum heat-generating formation in the fireplace, crumple up newspapers (always keeping a few pages in reserve in case toilet paper supplies run out), strike matches against the sanded edges of their England's Glory matchboxes, and shout out "ignition!" in Cape Canaveral style the moment a purple flame flickers into life.
After the flecks of debris have been swept up from the floor prefabniks will be seen sauntering into the kitchen and munching slices of crisply burnt toast. On a Saturday morning there will be time to leaf through a few pages of the Daily Mirror (or - if intellectual appetites have been whetted - a volume of The Bricklayer or a few pages the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.) This will be followed by a few moments "to stand and stare" before re-connecting with the maelstrom of life.

THIRTY-THREE

2009-09-21T14:43:00.013+01:00

Back in the eighteenth century young aristocrats went on grand tours to visit sites of classical civilisation. Here in the mid-twentieth century young prefab aristocrats go on grand tours to visit enamel furnaces.
In 1957 the old man took my brother on a visit to the enamel furnaces of Brussels and Paris. Mr Van de Zee of the Derro Company paid all their hotel and travel expenses! I pinned up a map of their planned route was pinned up on the bedroom wall. A blue line showed their train trip to Harwich, the sea crossing to the Hook of Holland, and the train ride to Brussels. (The young aristocrats of the eighteenth century sailed from Dover to Calais and made their land journeys by horse.)
A red line showing the location of the 'Iron Curtain' was added to the bedroom wall map to give a touch of Cold War suspense. If you ended up on the wrong side of the red line there was a risk of being dragged out of your bed and shot. (Only later did we cotton on to the sad fact that people on our 'free west' side - such as those living in the Spain of General Franco - were being taken out and shot as well.)
There was a familiar knock on our front door a full week before the two grand torers were due to return. It was the old man (wearing his 'wild colonial' look) and my brother. The old man had a
massive black eye. "The Grand Tour", he said, "had gone rather well." As for his newly-sculptured facial architecture this ("cough! cough!") was the result of an emamel furnace brick falling on his head.
Within a few days the beans had been spilled. The dreaded official officials had struck again. The Paris police are not renowned for their devotion to the Copper Jones' Queensbury Rules methods of crime control. The Fourth Republic was in deep trouble at this time. Military coups were being plotted by generals who were siding with the beleaguered settlers in Algeria. The arrivale of the furnace bricklayer from the prefabs with his American movie-style hat would have been an object of suspicion from the moment he stepped out of the train from Brussels. train. Fortunately the Derro Company secured his speedy release from custody. (How many times in history has a labourer been rescued from the claws of the state by the forces of trans-national capital!)
Although the days of the Fourth Republic were numbered, the gallois enamels furnace bricklayer helped keep the profits of the Derro Company going for another two decades.

Dark Footnote: In 1961 two hundred Algerians who were on a protest march in Paris were killed by the police.

THIRTY-TWO

2009-09-20T13:44:00.014+01:00

The old man is wary of officials - and that is official! Not just income tax officials, Ministry of Labour officials/national insurance officials/council office officials/passport officials/housing department officials/border control officials/rent collection officials/electoral registration officials/medical officials, but - and most of all - the official officials who are members of Her Majesty's Constabulary.
The old man's ancestors include the Teagues of Truro. Perhaps these Cornish horse-traders had nothing to do with the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685. But its aftermath certainly made an impact on the clan's mind-set. After the rising had been ruthlessly crushed Judge Jefferies orderd the execution of two hundred rebels and had a further two hundred transported into slavery in the Carribean. Children would shudder with fear if they were told that that "Judge Jefferies" was keeping an eye on them. When some of the Teagues moved to the coal mines and iron works of
South Wales the official officials would be drafted in by the State to ensure that the property of the employing class was safeguarded during strikes and lock-outs.
In 1956 the old man arrived at Bristol Temple Meads railway station in the early hours of the morning to find he had missed the connecting train to Twiverton. After setting out on the ten mile walk home the heavens opened up and torrents of rain poured down. As he paused for breath and rested his water-logged furnace bricklayer's travel bag on the pavement he saw that an official official's car was tracking his every move. His request to be given a few minutes of temporary shelter was hilariously dismissed.
The only official official who the old man holds in high regards is bike-pedalling Copper Jones. His job is to put the coercive arm of the state into our prefab estate. Although some Twivertonians belive that even Copper Jones has his "dark side"the old man concedes that he carries out his duties on our esate with considerable panache.
Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic from prefab number one once engaged the old man in a long kitchen debate on the role of the official officials. Theey concluded that the police had a complex dual function of both safeguarding the sectional interests of the powerful and protecting the general good as well. Dai had a vinegar-stained copy of Edward Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' in his carrier bag (the Romans really loved vinegar!) This book posed one of the trickiest of questions regarding institutions which specialise in applying armed force: Who guards the guards? How do the unarmed control those they have armed?
.....................................................................................................................................................................

Monmouth Rebellion Postscript: In 1688 a group of upper class plotters met in a grand house in Chesterfield. They proceeded to do what the Duke of Monmouth had failed to do just three years before - make a 'Glorious Revolution' and overthrow the Stuart Monarchy. But regime change is a tricky business. A review of Bath. A Social History 1680-1850 or A Valley of Pleasure, Yet A Sink of Iniquity (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) by R.S.Neale (published in the TLS) makes the following point: "What counts with regime change is not just what is done, but how it is done and who does the done."

THIRTY-ONE

2009-09-19T11:40:00.013+01:00

Gary Bollard of prefab number four could hardly believe his luck when he spotted a mouth-watering "without obligation!" advertisement in Tit-Bits magazine. Here was a onece in a lifetime chance of obtaining a "magnificent set of commemorative stamps" at a "bargain basement price" from "the Principality's premier philatelist emporium." If customers were not
"completely - satisfied" they could return them "without charge!" For Gary Bollard -Twiverton's answer to Stanley Gibbons - opportunity had well and truly knocked.
Gary was on tenterhooks as he waited for the magnificent set of commemorative stamps to arrive. However the postman ignored prefab nuber four, and Gary began to have nightmarish visions of the stamps being sent not to Woodhedge Road in Twiverton but to the vile and accursed Woodhedge Road of Tiverton in Devon. "The name of Tiverton should be banished from the English language!" Gary cried out whenever he passed a red pillar box. Then, quite out of the blue - and a full fortnight later - a "magnificent set of commemorative stamps" burst its rapturous way through the narrow opening of Gary Bollard's letter-box. The ecstatic rapture did not last for long. There can be few cases of philatelist interruptis which have produced such a dismal sense of anti-climax. The magnificent set of commemorative stamps must have been trodden on by dozens of size twelve steel-tipped mud-covered post-office sorting room boots. If the stamps had gone twelve rounds in the ring with Jack Dempsey or Rocky Marciano - or "twelve rounds with Jack Dempsey and Rocky Marciano" as 'Tubby' Lard would later remark - they would have been in far better shape.
After regaining his composure a downcast Gary headed off to the post office and sent the battered package back to the principality's de luxe emporium. The words "GOODS RECEIVED IN DAMAGED CONDITION!" were written in large black capital letters on the parcel's front and back. This was to be of no avail. Almost before you could say "Joseph Stalin's paranoid terror-state delighted in rooting out rootless cosmopolitans who camouflaged their dealings with British intelligence under an innocuous stamp-collecting veneer" a fuming-at-the-mouth letter catapulted its way back to the prefab at number four Woodhedge Road. In icy cool KGB style language it warned: "Contact will be made with with the Somerset constabulary unless a compensatory payment of two pounds and ten shillings is returned forthwith! The magnificent free sample we posted to your contemptible trailer-trash abode appears to have been deliberately trampled underfoot!"
Of course it does! The moment any item of value lands on one of our estate's bedraggled door-mats we drag it into the vermin-infested back yard and trample it underfoot with our mud-splattered hob-nail boots. Such are the mores and customs of Prefab Land.
Copper Jones consoled Gary with the thought that he had at least learnt a salutary lesson about succumbing to the meretricious blandishments of capitalism. The glad, confident mornings spent idly leafing through the inviting advertisements of Tit-Bits magazine were gone, never to return. The wisdom of the cryptic words of Twerton Villa's football coach about "keeping it tight at the back" had at long last been understood.
As it was said in the valleys of South Wales during the 1920s and 1930s: "Experience is a hard school, but fools will learn at no other."

THIRTY

2009-09-18T14:51:00.013+01:00

There are days when an undertow of emotion emerges out of nowhere to overwhelm the most ordinary of days. This is what happened to 'Tubby' Lard as he was making his way to the Weymouth House Technical School. (The curriculum of this school was so unrelentingly technical that "technically" there was doubt as to whether it was really a school at all.)
'Tubby' had given his usual 5A bus ride a miss in a bid to start improving his fitness. As he
walked down How Hill he drew in a deep breath and savoured the rich whiff of brewery yeast that lingers around the My Full Moon before whistling a happy tune. It was not long before his cracking pace had taken him to the spooky grime-encrusted railway arch by the Lower Bristol Road. As he passed under it an unknown girl zoomed by on her bike and shouted: "Out of the way, you fat slob!"
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!" This was a phrase which was often heard echoing around the prefab estate, and it was a phrase which carried little conviction. The words of the unknown girl hit 'Tubby' Lard with such a force that just a few months later 'Tubby' Lard could be called tubby no more. The malign jibe galvanised him out of his flabby "pile some more sugar on my Weetabix' lethargy" and changed the direction of his life.
In fact if 'Tubby' had not been walking through the grime-encrusted railway arch at that very moment he might never have joined the (now legendary) No Pain, No Gain! weightlifting Club, set up in the prefabs and his dreams of sporting success would have remained mere Walter Mitty phantoms of a flabby day-dreaming self.
As the jibe-hurling fast-projectile mounted girl sped by pedestrian 'Tubby' she felt over-whelmed by the high-fuelled energy of her life. "My life is going great, so let's make it feel even better by mocking this fat peasant!" The fact that she was wearing a grammar school uniform added another grain of salt into 'Tubby' Lard's freshly-inflicted wound. She (he mistakingly assumed) would be engrossed all day in studies of Renaissance art and literary criticism. He would be spending the entire afternoon sawing and chiselling away in the classroom that had been converted from Twiverton's old prison in the company of the deranged sideburned-knuckle-duster wearing crypto-Teddy Boy woodwork teacher. She was on course for life membership of the 'Nietzsche Society' (motto: the more bile you puke out on weak types who do not bash you back the better you are going to feel.) He had unwittingly co-opted himself into the 'Keep Your Head Down And Be Kind To Others Society' (motto: prepare to get hammered into pulp). She would be on a permanent high while he would be on a hiding to nothing.
The intersection of two life-trajectories under the grime-encrusted railway arch - those of the jibe-hurling girl and the pedestrian 'Tubby' - poses the perennial "Who Would You Rather Be?" question. Would you prefer to be like the overweight pedestrian 'Tubby' - a slow-moving target for every passing chariot-racing Wagnerian spear-thrower - or the lithe lean-limbed fast-moving jibe-hurling girl who feels the exhileration of the wind racing through her hair as she dispenses cathartic verbal kicks to any plodding losers whose shadows light her way?
Years later 'Tubby' Lard would feel a strange debt of gratitude to the "fat slob!" yelling girl whose face he could never remember. He would find himself wondering whether she was still racing through life with that same turbo-fuelled spite-filled elan, or whether fate had tired of her egoism and inflicted some sobering reversal of fortune under her own grime-encrusted railway arch. When 'Tubby' Lard's photograph made the front page of the Bath & Wilting he was shown holding the Somerset Weightlifting Trophy aloft. You could just about make out a "my claws are no longer blunt" tattoo (a quote from Mr F. Nietzsche) on his muscle-bound chest. As that 1950s' philosopher Charles Atlas discovered, deep in the psyche of many world famous body builders is a seven stone weakling who had sand kicked in his face.
One of 'Tubby' Lard's many dreams is to have the following words engraved in silver lettering on
Twiverton's famous grime encrusted railway arch:

"Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head."

'As You Like It'
Act 2 Scene 1.

TWENTY-NINE

2009-09-16T15:55:00.017+01:00

"It's a free country!" is a phrase you hear all the time on our estate. (Maybe as memories of the struggle against Hitler fade it will be heard less and less.) "It's a man's world!" is what girls say to you with a steely glint in their eyes (which means they will make sure it is not going to stay that way for much longer). "Looking for something to do" is what kids say on grey lacklustre days when they are not in the mood for a game of football. DPs - Displaced Persons - whose lives have been broken by the Nazi gangsters look back on their past and say "Hindsight is no good!" or "It has been more than flesh and blood can stand!" On some days the old man returns from town and talks of encounters with "tenth-rate punks." (He is yet to encounter any "first-rate punks.") My tough cousin from South Wales warns anyone looking for trouble that he will
"knock them into the middle of next week." "Why was he born so beautiful, why was he born at all? He's no bloody use to anyone, he's no bloody use at all!" This is the song which some people sing when they walk by the Smileys' prefab.
The old man must be one of the strongest labourers on the estate, and he still cannot believe he was turned down by each of the armed services on unspecified health grounds when he tried to sign up in 1939. Perhaps if he had been allowed to join up he would have ended up "dying in the western desert" (another favourite phrase) in the battles against Rommel.) During the war he worked on Avonmouth docks before going off to help build the floating Mulberry Harbours that were used in the D-Day invasion.
Once we were sat around the kitchen table having breakfast. I asked the old man: "So what did you do in the war?" "I was in the Japanese Navy!" came his lightening reply.

TWENTY-EIGHT

2009-09-16T14:54:00.024+01:00

In pride of place in the art gallery that is our sitting-room is The Chinese Girl (or the Green Lady as it is sometimes called.) It was modelled on Lenka, the girl friend of the Russian painter Vladimir Tretchikoff who he met in a New York restaurant. It has been called the "The Mona Lisa of the British Working Class." Whenever the public school boys who produce Private Eye want to make fun out of the lower-orders they can be relied on to show a cartoon of a council house interior with The Chinese Girl painting in the background. It makes readers smile everytime.
While recuperating from his labours as a furnace bricklayer the old man enjoys sitting in his armchair with a box of Swan Vesta matches, cigarette papers and a roll-up of Old Holborne tobacco within easy reach. (If he has just returned from the Continent there will be a box of Dutch cigars and a bottle of brandy.) 'Monty' Porter was baffled by his fascination with art and asked him "what's it all about." The old man tells him it can send numinous shivers down the spine, smuggle secret tips from the past on how life should be led, and conjure up the sound of a guitar being played on a lonely hillside. "Above all - as Hegel said - 'art is the sensuous presentation of ideas.'" Then he brings everything down with a thud by turning towards me and saying: "Nip down the shop, son, and get a couple of ounces of Old Holborne tobacco and a box of matches."
The Chinese Girl is taking everything in - the laughter, the hopes, the arguments, the forebodings and apprehensions. She can sense that we are going through tricky times. The Chinese Girl never returns our gaze. Even surprise tactics (like creeping in to the sitting-room on all fours and firing off a lightening glance in her direction) never catch her off guard. Perhaps she is immersed in her own concerns and brooding about being called a Girl when anyone can see she is a grown-up woman. She could be thinking about the indignities that have been inflicted on Chinese civilisation by the onslaught of colonialism. Or maybe she has some inkling about what is going to befall us. 'Que sera sera!' - "the future not being ours to see" - is the popular song of the moment - and when it is played on the wireless her eyes almost seem to flicker.
Prints of The Chinese Girl painting first went on sale in 1952. The old man was one of the first people in Bath to buy one. This fact does not impress everyone. Once I was looking through the window of the art shop in Green Street which has a copy of The Chinese Girl is on display. Two well-heeled characters then came and stood behind me. They stared at the painting with great intensity for a few minutes and then started laughing. One of them chortled: "The painting before us represents the very essence of plebeian taste!"

TWENTY-SEVEN

2009-09-14T17:25:00.022+01:00

A number of the books which circulated around the prefab estate had their source in the back bar of the Ring O 'Bells inn which doubled up as a free library. Without it the old man might never have got hold of a copy of Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by W.H. Davies. This was a cult book in the South Wales valleys, not least because of the vivid description the author gives of having one of his legs sliced off while jumping trains in America. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle depicts the slaughtering machine of the Chicago stockyards, and was a favourite with the Ring O'Bell's landlord. He would tell the back bar drinkers that "it pre-figured what Germany did in Poland in the early 1940s." For drinkers in search of some lighter reading the landlord would recommend Flann O'Brien's The Hard Life. This warns its readers that "all the persons in this book are real and none is fictitious even in part" (which also applies to The Prefab Files.) One of the Ring O'Bells' regulars was never seen in the pub again after becoming convinced that the Gaelic character Macsamailliun Ui Phionasa (Maximillian O' Penisa) was a deliberate take on him.
The most borrowed book in the Ring O'Bells' library was Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge. "Shady people in sunny places" was Maugham's description of his neighbours in the South of France, and "Shady people in an unsunny place" was how the Ring O'Bells' landlord (with tongue in cheek) would refer to his book borrowing clientele. Borrowers of The Razor's Edge wpuld be told "to look out for Mr Maugham's stylish use of the colon."
A passage in a Mikhal Sholokhov novel on the brutal treatment meted out to prisoners-of-war in Russia touched a raw nerve with the old man. (His father had been a prisoner of war in Germany during the First World War. He had left the coal mines, enlisted in the army, and after being captured was sent to work down a German coalmine. His jet black hair had turned completely white by the time he returned home.
"My father was not treated like that!" the old man said after reading the Sholokhov passage. He felt that the author had given impliicit moral approval of these dreadful acts, and never read another of his books. When Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front was left on Ossie Oster's kitchen table his mum was taken aback. "It was banned in Germany" she whispered.
Our prefabs were not just literary gold mines. They were places that had been scarred by history.

TWENTY-SIX

2009-09-13T14:22:00.027+01:00

Every prefab has its secret places. There is endless speculation on what the Swileys in prefab number twenty-five keep hidden away in the brown suitcase in the back of their (always locked up) coalhouse. Our secret places are the compartment of the travel trunk which stands in the hallway (the rent book, bank book, passports and fire insurance papers are kept here) and the bottom drawer in the cupboard with built-in metal drawers in the sitting-room. This serves as the treasure trove for valued cultural artefacts. Take a lucky dip here and you could retrieve any of the following: a Football Monthly or Woman's Own, assorted pieces of Meccano, scores of subbuteo table footballers (many of which have been unfortunately decapitated), a miniature relica of world champion Juan Manuel Fangio's racing car, a guide to the night sky purchased in
the London Planetarium, a picture of John Charles signing for Juventus football club (this marks the start of International Football Capitalism), a bundle of Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained!
labels from the Children's Book Club, a cigar tin with an unlit Dutch cigar inside, and a hit-record from the Platters called Smoke Gets In Your Eyes which is biding its time until we get a record-player.)
One of the most unsettling books lent to the old man by Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic (resident of prefab number one and one of our leading literatis) was the Selected Writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. It had one line which impressed us all a lot. It was about redeeming the past and transforming every 'It was' into 'I wanted it thus!' "If only we could do that!" the old man said. Most of the other sections of the book did not go down well at all. Nietzsche seems to have been keen on weak people perishing. Those who live in fragile temporary constructions like prefabs are weak by definition, so that was all of us done for. Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic told us that Nietzsche's sister was an unpleasant woman who turned Nietzsche's home into a Nazi shrine and museum.
It is said that not long before he died Nietzsche saw a horse being savagely beaten. Instead of joining in the fun and giving the weak horse an extra beating - which is what some readers might have expected - Nietzsche embraced it and started to weep. This image of the beaten horse being caressed by the philosopher was to linger in the imagination of some people on our prefab estate for a long time.

TWENTY-FIVE

2009-09-07T15:16:00.021+01:00

There is tons to read in our prefab. Eight encyclopaedic Books Of Knowledge, a Book Of Hobbies (both of these are encased in the heavy red covers you can glimpse in the libraries of country houses), a Concise Oxford Dictionary. ("Written in 1917 before my brother's death " says its eerie preface), plus a three volume set of The Bricklayer which the old man is trowelling his way through.
Other cargo scattered our prefab deck includes a biography of General Rommel, Biggles novels,
a crime thriller called I'll Say She Does! which has a garish cover, a fitness training manual by the Australian coach Percy Cerutty ("Mix different types of breakfast cereal together and run on sand dunes!"), and a Charles Atlas dynamic tension booklet which will stop seven stone weaklings having sand kicked in their faces. Give Mr Atlas just fifteen minutes a day and you will be a changed man!
From the word go prefabs were arenas for political debate, so do not be surprised to se a few copies of Encounter magazine here. This is not (as 'Tubby' Lard thought) a guide on chatting up girls but a high-powered monthly journal of ideas. It specialises in finely written articles on 'The God That Failed' (i.e. the idea of communism). Some people dismiss it as "'soft power' Cold War propaganda" and say it is funded by the USA's Central Intelligence Agency. According to Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic this is indeed the case - "it is the West's answer to the Red Army Choir and the Bolshoi Ballet." But he reckons it beats reading V.I. Lenin's Speeches at Party Congresses (1918-1922) by a mile.
The Ring magazine keeps afloat without needing undercover payments from anyone. One of the back issues we have has photographs of Floyd Patterson's defeat by Ingemar Johansson in the 1959 world heavyweight championship. (It also mentions an amazing young boxer called Cassius Clay). Never make the mistake of confusing The Ring boxing magazine with Wagner's Ring - the one which Adolf Schicklgruber and his Nazi gangster pals always raved on about. (Mark Twain was on to something when he said Wagner's music "is better than it sounds", and 'Ossie' Oster in prefab number seventeen complains that it always gives him a feeling of wanting to bomb Warsaw.)
1959 was also the year when everyone on the estate seemed to have a copy of T.S.Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in their side pocket or carrier bag. After 'Ossie' came across Eliot's poem 'Bubank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar' we decided to give him a miss.
Prefab dwellers have gained a reputation for hiding their lights under bushes. "They hide their
'real' reading inside copies of Tit-Bits or Reveille" is what is often said.
Unfortunately in most cases the only thing that is hidden under a copy of Tit-Bits is another copy of Tit-Bits.

TWENTY-FOUR

2009-08-30T11:37:00.030+01:00

There is a solitary grandeur about a cluster of prefabs marooned on the edge of a stony hearted city. Not that prefabs are natural loners. Like buffalos they prefer to hang together in herds. This gives them with a sense of defensive security against a condescending and sometimes threatening world.
While prefab design has much to commend it there is one critical flaw. Their walls are far too thin-skinned. This makes prefabs too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. (As our goldfish - frozen solid in its bowl last December - would tell you if it could.) The prefabs' critical Achilles' heel is a lack of thickness. "The same cannot be said of prefab residents" as our enemies always say.
If someone is visiting someone who lives in a prefab (yes, such a thing does happen!) and is in need of directions there is no point in stopping someone and asking the way to "twenty four Newtin Road." A baffled stare wil be the only response. But ask to be directed to "The Prefabs" and there will be no problems at all. The slick salesman who lives in the immaculate prefab on the corner of Woodhedge Road used to take offence when people referred to him as living in The Prefabs. "My abode is forty-six Woodhedge Road, not The Prefabs!" would be his crisp response. Today he has come to terms with his fate and wears his Prefabs designation with pride. "Just as one has 'The British Empire', 'The Establishment', 'The Royal Navy and 'The Reform Club', so one has 'The Prefabs'."
Officials in Town Halls assigned with the delicate task of the Naming Of Names have to steer a perilous course between the Scylla of elevation and the Charybdis of ridicule. Neither Cheyney Mews or Dust Cart Alley would fit the bill as as the address for a row of prefabs. Middle of the road neutrality is the obvious course, and this explains why most all prefabs are located in Roads. In fact roads are right up prefabs' streets. Show me a row of prefabs in the Royal Crescent and I will show you a coalhouse with a diamond-studded roof! Or as the Naming Of Names official from the Guildhall told a Bath & Wilting reporter "If we gave one prefab a bourgeois appellation they will all want one!" Devalue the currency of language and the world would be turned upside down!
Not far from our prefabs and camouflaged behind a cluster of trees is a home for ladies who cannot speak or hear. Tag along with Ronnie Rogers' mum when she does her cleaning job there and you will go into a large room with a high ceiling and a circle of chairs. This is where the residents spend their days. From time to time some of them can stand it no longer and they
will race out into the garden in a flood of tears. Come And Cheer Us Up House should be made the home's new name.

TWENTY-THREE

2009-08-29T14:25:00.025+01:00

When the dust of the post-war settlement had settled the residents of our estate started going their separate ways. In the run-up to Prefab Demolition Day mouldy drawers had to be prised out of mouldy drawers; bath tubs and flat irons lifted on to the scrap metal merchant's van; rolls of frayed black and white squared lino bundled up in canvas bags; and the priceless paintings by Turner, Rembrandt and Canaletto sent off for secure storage. (Just kidding on that last one).
The demolition of Henry Fielding's fine house left a legacy of civic guilt in its wake, and it was agreed that a prefab should be preserved for posterity and housed in a Museum Of Lost Memory. On the day of its official opening Messrs Oblivion and Void (Curators-In-Chief) gave welcoming speeches to the invited guests. Past residents of Woodhedge and Newtin Roads were there (all sat in the museum's balconies and wearing the fashions of yester-year) plus such iconic figures as Sir Isaac Pitman, Sir Isaac Silk-Farr, Mortimer Wheeler, Mayor Ray Rosewarn, Venanzio Rauzzini (what a voice!), Yehudi Menuhin, J.A. Roebuck (radical firebrand), Peter Panton (scholar and the stonemason), Angela Carter (who we had last been seen leaving the Bell Inn in Walcot Street with a surreal gothic pint of beer in her hand.) As the guests assembled Alberto Semprini played on the piano. The Bath-born maestro's Semprini Serenades were broadcast on the Light Programme for twenty five years from 1957 on. As soon as it was switched on 'Tubby' Lard would cry out: "The tedium! The tedium!" or - following Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) "The horror! The horror!" Of course this was all an act: in truth 'Tubby' really loved his Semprini. When The Last Surviving Twiverton Prefab was unveiled (how I gasped when I realised it was prefab number twenty-four!) - the inspired jazz musician from The Bell Inn gave out a final blast on his trumpet. The Museum of Lost Memory is really worth a visit. Unfortunately no one can remember where it is. The elusive presence of the prefabs is still felt today. It tugs away at their former residents' thoughts, peers over shoulders, brushes against coat sleeves, queries acts of bad faith, leaves a scented hint of consolation in the crevices of lonely evenings, and provides balm and solace for those who find themselves adrift in more evasive times.

TWENTY-TWO

2009-08-29T14:01:00.018+01:00

Everyone know that Prefab Demolition Day will be highly charged. No, residents on the estate will not have to pay money to watch their prefabs being bulldozed into the ground and smashed into pulp. Prefab Demolition Day is going to be highly charged in the currency of raw tension, see-sawing emotion, and heart-wrenching bathos.
Knocking the estate down will be the biggest event to take place here since - well, since it first went up. There are rumours that a coachload of German and Italian prisoners-of-war who helped put the prefabs up will be coming over. When we watch the steel frames, plaster-board lining, and asbestos cladding being pummelled into dust there will hardly be a single wrinkled cheek which will stay dry. (And some people will cry as well.)
In some parts of the country prefab residents organized hunger strikes in a valiant bid to prevent their homes being torn down. Thre is no way this will happen here. Just a few hundred yards up the road are the de luxe homes - real council houses - that prefab residents will be moving into. "I feel like one of those consultants who Aneurin Bevan bought off when he set up the National Health Service" said Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one. "My mouth has been stuffed with gold!" No one should have any illusions about banner-waving delegations being about to march off to the Guildhall to plead for a last minute reprieve. If a 'Prefab Demolition Day Is Off!' headline was to be splashed across the front page of the Bath & Wilting the sound of teeth being gnashed and cloth being torn would be quite terrifying.
There are still a few nostalgicians around who will shed a tear when they shut their prefab doors for the last time. But history has moved into a different gear. Chrome-lined milkbars, bumper-sized jukeboxes, Formica table tops, and Italian winkle-pickers are setting a different tone. Most prefab dwellers want to grasp hold of the shiny keys of non-prefabricated citizenship - and grasp hold of them now!

TWENTY-ONE

2009-08-28T14:59:00.028+01:00

In its heyday the Italian Villa that was Silk-Farr House had well-manicured lawns, delightful flower beds, a boating lake, a tropical glasshouse, a tennis court, a splendid water fall, and even a hermitage with a paid recluse. (After sneaking out of the grounds for an unreclusive pint in the My Full Moon the recluse decided never to return.) In the 1930s Sir Isaac Silk-Farr organised children's fetes in the grounds and rough-hewn villagers and smooth-tongued scions of the Somerset gentry played croquet together in an idyll of late Edwardian-style convivality!
The grounds of Silk-Farr House were initially laid out in geometrical form. This was replaced by the 'natural' style of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, which in turn gave way to a wild romantic 'picturesque' look. 'Mona Lot' from number sixty-nine Woodhedge Road (it turned out that there was no number sixty-nine in Woodhedge Road) wrote a stinging letter to the Bath & Wilting. It said "the time had come to talk truth to power" and ended with the ringing line: "For Farr-Silk's Sake make your mind up, Sir Isaac! The grounds of your Italian Villa cannot be symmetrical and natural and 'picturesque' within the space of two decades!"
In its twilight years Silk-Farr House hit on hard times. Even in its hey-day the much trumpeted
warm-air heating system had never been all that efficient (especially in the servants' rooms) and even Miss Silk-Farr's own quarters were said to be "as cold as a prefab kitchen on a February morning in 1947." The gas lamps on the gravel drive glowed ever fainter, and the residents of the neighbouring prefab estate had a sense of an evening coming in which would light none of the Italian Villa's once glittering lights. Locked away in the vaults of Bath's Victoria Art Gallery is a painting called The Lady Of The Italian Villa by an artist whose nom de brush was 'The Tristan Tzara of Twiverton'. It shows the much talked about scene of Miss Silk-Farr stumbling across the prostrate form of her Firewood-Chopper-In-Chief. On his very first chopping day he had been sent into a deep sleep by the scent of the mystical mushrooms which grow so luxuriantly in the turrets of Brunel's railway tunnel. His dreams were filled with images of starlit nights and Harvest moons, of jugs of winking mead and tales of those who had died too young. Miss Silk-Farr is wearing her purple dress (how Twiverton women love purple!) and she reaches down to cool the firewood chopper's sweat-laden brow with her silken hankerchief and rescue him from his journey into the ancient settlement's troubled past.

TWENTY

2009-08-28T13:57:00.018+01:00

The more refined and genteel prefabs on our estate tended to be furthest away from the ever merry My Full Moon public house and closest to the iron fence which bordered the grounds of Twiverton's finest - and Twiverton's only - Italian Villa. In the Victorian era Silk-Farr House (as Silk-Farr House was otherwise known) was a citadel of power-broking, political intrigue and financial wheeler-dealing. (Cinema goers should be under no illusions that the forthcoming Hollywood blockbuster The Mysterious Lady Who Lived In The Italian Villa strays a considerable way from the historical truth.) In the 1880s anyone unfortunate enough to make a faux-pas at one of the Italian Villa's famous masked balls would have their dreams of high office crash down in ruins. (As the descendants of the notorious Sir Roger Sliley (Bart.) know all too well.)
In its twilight early 1960s' days the ever enigmatic Miss Silk-Farr kept up the family's tradition of public-spirited philanthrophic endeavour by making an annual visit to the local junior school (built in 1952 on land her family had donated to the community) in order to present books and gold leafed certificates and inspire bright-eyed pupils with a hunger for glittering prizes.
During the 1914-18 war the mills owned by the Silk-Farr produced fabrics for British Army uniforms. With the end of part two of the horrendous European Wars in 1945 the Silk-Farrs used their famous west wing to house an archive of historical research. (However plans to have the words "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" engraved on its ceiling had to be abandoned following a crisis in funding.) Anderson Perry - a patrician Ulster aristocrat who is still rembered for his editorship of the Soho-based journal Theory Is Good For You spent a six month sabbatical beavering away in the archives of Silk-Farr House. His pathbreaking analysis of Labourist submission to the hegemony of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie - and of how these two social formations fused together to form a new power bloc in 19th century Britain - could even have been formulated here. (Painstaking empirical research by the renowned Bath historian R.S. Neale - who left Bath Technical College in 1964 to take up a chair in economic history at the University of New England - had reached the same conclusion a few months before AP published his findings in Theory Is Good For You.)
At their plutocratic peak the Silk-Farrs owned a woollen mill, a quarry, a coal mine, a limeworks, and acres of prime Somerset farmland. In the classic work The Rise and Fall of a Twiverton Dynasty a forensic investigation is made of the somewhat murky origins of the Silk-Farr wealth. The spurious claim that its portfolio included the very same slave plantation in Antigua so fleetingly mentioned in Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park is shown to be quite groundless. The original source of the Silk-Farr's capital (or 'equity' as the discrete bourgeoisie prefer to call it) was wool and specifically the "sheep ate men" fields of the county of Cumberland. As for the mythology that is peddled to this day by the pamphleteers of Glastonbury - that the lineage of the Silk-Farrs can be traced directly back to Merlin the Wizard and King Arthur - this is nailed once and for all.
Too many brows have been furrowed by the final sentence of The Rise and Fall of a Twiverton Dynasty. This is a quotation from Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) - one of Marx's favourite authors - but with a question mark added in golden print. So instead of "Behind every fortune lies a great crime" the book's final sentence reads:

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime?"

Why the question mark is what everyone asks. The book's anonymous authors (who now describe themselves as "post-Marxists") have now made everything clear. The adding of the golden printed question mark symbolised a critique of their former ideological stance. It was an acknowledgement of the entrepreneurial flair, the enduring sense of civic responsibility and the personal integrity displayed by the Silk-Farrs during those long Twiverton years. (The Silk-Farrs' company went bankrupt in 1954 and their beloved Italian Villa was demolished in 1963.) Here was a family of property whose legacy went far beyond property to touch people's hearts for generations to come. In these more tawdry times The Prefab Files rise to salute them.

NINETEEN

2009-08-27T14:31:00.026+01:00

It was in the summer of 1955 that the dynamic Londoner arrived on the prefab estate. Within days of his moving in he had bulldozed his entire back garden away to make space for a garage. He didn't yet have a car, but everyone said "what a garage!" No one had ever had a grage on the prefab estate before. The Londoner would fire off surly, agitated glances at any yokels who crossed his path. Given half the chance he would have bulldozed half of Twiverton away .
The dynamic Londoner took an instant dislike to Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one. Dai was the yang to the dynamic Londoner's ying. If Dai had had a garage he would have filled it with his books and cuttings from newspapers. All the years of wild scribbling and submitting manuscripts to editors and publishers had got Dai nowhere, and it was just as well he had not given up his day job as a security guard at Isaac Pitman's printing press on the Lower Bristol Road. Dai seemed set to become one of Thomas Grey's "mute inglorious Miltons" who lie buried and forgotten in country churchyards. People said he was like Bath City's full-back Tony Book who languished for years in non-league football in the Southern League.
Yet just as Tony Book was rescued when Malcolm Allison was appointed manager of Bath City,
so Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic was rescued - at least partially - by the enigmatic Miss Silk-Farr who lived in the exquisite Italian villa. Her launching in 1958 of the Twiverton Literary Supplement (or the TLS as it is more widely known) lifted Dai (whose pen name was the "Welsh Hegelian") out of prefab obscurity. Ever since then he has been gathering up small chippings from the statue of fame. "What AJP Taylor did for Dylan Thomas, and Lord Beaverbrook did for Michael Foot, so Miss Silk-Farr will do for Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic!" This is what they started saying in the My Full Moon - and how wrong they were (at least so far.) But if Dai's collected essays are ever published he could still have the last word.
People are always asking how Dai Lectic came to acquire his 'Tolstoy' middle name. This was a result of the very first column he wrote for the TLS back in May 1958. It was a rambling discussion of the politics of inequality. Dai began by quoting Emile Durkheim on the idea of socialism being less a theory than "a cry of pain." This was followed by a structuralist analysis of 'accidents': "can it be accidental that most 'accidents' strike those who occupy the lower foothills of the social structure?" But it was Dai's final paragraph on Leo Tolstoy's aside about misery and happiness which struck a chord with the readers and led to him acquiring 'Tolstoy' as a new middle name. Happiness seems to possess the same radiant quality in all times and places, but misery comes in different shapes and forms.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910): "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic: (1917 - ): "And all happy prefabs resemble each other, and each unhappy prefab is unhappy in its own way." (From the TLS, May 1958.)

EIGHTEEN

2009-08-26T13:01:00.021+01:00

The slick salesman who lives in the corner prefab on Woodhedge Road was always in pole position in the race for top prestige position on the estate. This financial colossus did not just have a telephone. He had a Ford Popular car and a television set as well (which made it the estate's one and only 'triple crown'!) A squad of post office engineers was sent to put up a telephone pole up just for his prefab. This made it 'pole' position twice over.
Everyone expected the son of the slick salesman to sail through the eleven plus examination and win a scholastic 'gold' (a place at the grammar school.) And sail through the eleven plus he did. Our own platoon on the estate won two 'golds', two 'silvers' (places at the technical school), and six 'bronzes' (places at the secondary modern schools.) "Both the prefabs and Britain always punch above their weight!" said the slick salesman's son to Stan Malcolm from Camelot Green. (From then on Stan, who goes to school which is 'approved', would call him an "Irredeemably elitest swine!")
When the time came for us to leave what the slick salesman's son called "the gemeinschaft world of our small primary school" for "the gesellschaft world of the big secondary school" it was like moving from a classless utopia into a quasi-fascist state. Friendships were broken up, and former pals like Len Flanders started to hurl bitter canards at his ex-buddies who sported blazers from the technical and grammar school. "You lot think see yourseves as being oh so superior to us sec. mod. types!" When his schooling was completed Len pinned his certificate of secondary education (CSE) up on his bedroom wall (he called it "the poor man's consolation prize") and plotted revenge. Soon he found a lucratve niche in the building supply industry. It was his determination to prove the mentally challenged inventors of eleven plus IQ classifications wrong which gave him an unrelenting hunger to succeed. He did not hang around his old residence in Shores Way for long. (Which is just as well as the houses in Shores Way have weak foundations and are built on top of a disused coalmine. The residents have yet to be told.)
The slick salesman's son was all for grammar schools. "How on earth am I going to escape from the prefabs without them!" he would say. "It would be a comprehensive disaster" if everyone went to the same type of secondary school. "Standards would collapse, pupils like the low-achieving Swileys would rule the roost, and civilization and culture in the Matthew Arnold sense would go to the dogs! That is why I am apprehensive about the comprehensive!" No wonder the picture above the mantelpiece in the slick salesman's prefab was that of Matthew Arnold.

Matthew Arnold (1822-88) on culture:
"the best which has been thought and said."

In 1959 the Bath & Wilting sent one of its junior reporters, an eager-beaver called Rees-Mogg, to find out how many kids on our prefab estate attended fee-paying schools. His article - "No prefab kids at Harrow, they prefer schools which are 'approved'", provoked a barrage of angry responses (Oddly enough they were mainly from people called Waugh.) The phrase "self-pitying hogwash!" was used by a Mr A. Waugh (Junior.) Mr E. Waugh (Senior) declared that prefab estates like ours "were awash with bursaries and scholarships to our top public schools. I have been told on good authority that the upper-sixth at Winchester is absolutely infested with the children of prefab-dwellers from Twiverton!"
'Ossie' from prefab number seventeen was beaten uo in Bath city centre just because he was wearing a (borrowed) Bath Technical College scarf. Who knows what these thugs would have done do he had been wearing a Clifton College scarf. Len Flanders might moan about his time at East Hill sec.mod. but at least he was given some driving lessons there. Those of us who were sent to Weymouth House Technical School (1873-1973) had to put up with having creepy woodwork lessons from a knuckle-dustered teddy boy!

SEVENTEEN

2009-08-26T12:31:00.026+01:00

From 1944 on large sums of treasure were spent by the Mighty State Machine to put prefabs up. Two decades later large sums of treasure were spent by the Mighty State Machine to
knock prefabs down. The old philosophy made famous by Tudor Walters ('ensure that public housing is of a high quality') was nudged to one side by the philosophy of Tudor T. Block ('just ensure that public housing is high'.)
Those who first moved into the new tower blocks were typically bricklayers, bus drivers, panel beaters, shop assistants and the like. Human capital of this type has low investment costs and is thus easily replaceable if the blocks come crashing down in the Ronan Point style of 1968. Followers of Le Corbusier (or Charles-Edouard Jeanneret as Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic always called him) had nothing in principle against ground-hugging prefabs. They just wanted to have them lifted high into the sky. This would enable their cloud-hugging residents to give "not waving but drowning" waves to the pilots of aeroplanes who zoomed by their kitchen windows.
A financial spur to the 'Corbusier/Jeanneret hoist prefabs skywards' movement was provided by the 1956 Housing Subsidy Act. If public housing went up four floors the local authority was given £20 for each flat. If it went up another two floors this largesse was almost doubled. The low-density/one-storey 1940s' prefabs with their front and back gardens buttered none of T. Dan Smith's planning committee parsnips and earned zilch fees for John Poulson's architect and consultancy firm. So it was little wonder that prefabs were soon trembling in their low-slung boots. "So this is how the Russian aristocracy felt in 1917" said a mellow Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic in prefab number one. The lateral thinkers in the 'Home Counties' (as if every county is not a 'home' county to those who live in it) had won game, set and match. Their case against housing the masses in low-density housing on acres of expensive land won the day. Just as cloud-touching high tech flats went up the little prefabs with their little gardens were coming down.

SIXTEEN

2009-08-24T12:08:00.021+01:00

In the early 1950s a school in Twiverton won national renown for its expertise in the mathematics of 'positive negatives'. When one of its teachers 'found' that something had 'gone' the fleshy and non-fleshy crevices of the school's pupils would be subjected to a rigorous inspection. What those in charge of these rigorous inspections failed to realise was that the Evil Coin Stealers who wreaked such havoc in this Twiverton school soon developed an uncanny sense of when crevices were about to be inspected. They would then artfully slip the stolen coin
into the unsuspecting pockets of one of the more naive pupils in their class. And a pupil whose pockets were more naive than most was 'Tubby' Lard.
Those who were imprisoned in the Soviet Union at this time (circa.1952) and who for reasons unknown wanted to escape from their socialist paradise would endeavour to find a "cow" to accompany them on their journey. A "cow" was the name they gave to some naive unsuspecting person invited to join them on their bid for freedom. Having a "cow" in the wastes of Siberia was the smart thing to do. It meant that when those fleeing the Gulag ran out of food they could always eat their "cow."
The prefab of forty-five Woodhedge Road in which 'Tubby' Lard lived had a famously well-stocked larder. This meant that 'Tubby' fitted the "cow" mode to a cue. In a very real sense 'Tubby' Lard was wasted on our prefab estate. Here was someone who was tailor-made for the wastes of Siberia.
One day when a coin became a 'positive negative' - when it was 'found' to have 'gone' -an Evil Coin Stealer became an Evil Coin Planter and deftly placed a bright shining coin inside the snug and unsuspecting pocket of 'Tubby' Lard. This was done just seconds before the rigorous inspection of pupils' crevices took place. Minutes later the ashen-white resident of prefab number forty-five had been intimidated into making a "I am in the pay of Leon Trotsky and the British Secret Service" confession. 'Tubby' was ordered to spend the rest of the day staring at the blank neo-Siberian expanse of the creamy white classroom wall. Staring at this creamy white Siberian-like expanse was the favoured way of making pupils ponder on their misdeeds and repent their sins. In 'Tubby' Lard's case this caused even more mental turmoil. Thi was because
'Tubby' - being well meaning 'Tubby' - had next to no sins to confess. At least he was able to
console himself with the thought that - unlike his fellow-feeling 'cows' walking through the wastes of Siberia - no one was about to eat him.
In the valleys of South Wales in the 1920s it was often said that "Experience is a hard school". By the time the pupils of the school were being ushered into the hall to be given the sad news about the death of King George VI 'Tubby' had begun to recognise the wisdome of these words. As he stood to attention during the minute's silence the idetity of both the Evil Coin Stealer and the Evil Coin Planter (they were one and the same) became clear. The warning words of William Blake (1757-1827) then rang through his mind:

"When a sinister person means to be your enemy, they always start by trying to become your friend."

FIFTEEN

2009-08-24T11:30:00.022+01:00

What is special about prefab design is its knack of stretching minimalism to new heights. There is no space for clutter in a prefab. As a model for uncluttered living prefab life takes some beating.
By not having any stairs minimalism is stretched to new heights. The shock of missing a step as you walk downstairs (which happens once every 2,222 times) is unknown inside prefabs.
(Alan Watkins of the Bath &Wilting once remarked that interviewing the MP for Taunton was
like "walking downstairs and somehow missing the last step. You were uninjured but remained disconcerted".)
"Man falls to death down his prefab stairs!" could only be a headline in Mad magazine. In one of the magazine's "let's look on the bright side of bad news!" issues there was a 'true life' report of how a clock on a motor car dashboard started working again for the first time in twenty-five years! This was after the car had crashed into a lamp post, killing the driver, mowing down three pedestrians, and decapitating a stray dog.
Being stairless does not mean that prefabs have no design glitches. The two steps leading down from the kitchen into the back yard are dangerously steep. Like the psychopath who lives next door they are a disaster waiting to happen. It is not always the case that prefabs have a mellowing effect on frayed nerves - as Adrian Denton (resident of prefab number thirty-six) will tell you. Once he was viciously punched from one end of his front garden to the other - and then hit with a leather belt. This incident took place just a few feet from the window where his old man - a stony-faced bus conductor known as Hawkface - sits watching his neighbours' every move. So why on earth did the coiled-attack machine known as Hawkface not intervene when his own son was being so grievously assaulted in front of his very eyes? Sherlock Holmes would have solved this mystery in a moment. It was Hawkface who was doing the assaulting.
Hawkface only takes on those who are smaller than him. However Hawkface is much smaller than Miss ('Pat' to her friends) Wafer Thin and he would never dare to take her on. Miss Wafer Thin is teacher-in-charge in the small school which is squeezed between the My Full Moon public house and the Saint Michael Is No Angel Church. thee seems little doubt that Miss Wafer Thin was placed on this earth in order to make a philosophical point. Namely that essence (how things really are) is not the same as appearance (how things seem). If one of her pupils was to step out of line Miss Wafer Thin's knobbly elbows and puny fists would be instantly transformed into wild-manic-flailing-windmill-style-beating-machines. So when she overheard the kid from the Blackway Estate who wanted to be a jockey make a derogatory remark about his new step-parents Miss Wafer Thin sprung into action. He was taken on a ten circuit canter around the classroom and made to jump over (oops! that should be 'into') the imaginary fences Miss Wafer Thin's mind's eye had painted up on the classroom walls. (Inspect these same walls even today and you will see the wall indents made by the 'irrational exhuberance' of that carefree 1950s' school day.)
Her work-out exercise completed, and with a healthy red glow now in her cheeks, Miss Wafer Thin would gently calm her shell-shocked pupils down and tell them how good the Germans were at making toys.

Charles Dickens (1812-1870): "In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice."

FOURTEEN

2009-08-18T10:32:00.021+01:00

In the 19th century its High Street was so poorly maintained that Twiverton was known as Twiverton-on-the-Mud. 'Tubby' Lard (a resident of prefab number seven) gave the local citizenry an untimely reminder of this distant horse-manured and dirt-splattered past when he was let home early from school.
'Tubby' had been feeling a shade below par. Despite experiencing a call of nature he felt unable to summon up the formidable degree of courage needed to use the school lavatory. (Rumour had it that one in ten of those who ventured down the unlit stairs into the lavatory in the basement of Twiverton Village Hall was never seen again.) 'Tubby''s cunning plan was to feign illness. It worked and he was told to make his way home. As he passed the 18th century house in which Henry Fielding had once stayed a pent-up internal implosion - a spontanous 'Tom Jones' of untoppable velocity - burst asunder in his lower ramparts. As the glistening half-liquified substance (a "gift for the mother" was how Sigmund Freud described it) slid its luxurious way 'Tubby's left leg he experienced a moment of surpreme abandon and exhilaration. The memory of this frisson-filled taboo-challenging open-air moment would stay with him until his dying day. When the mood of Apollonian exultation finally subsided 'Tubby' grasped the vulnerability of his predicament and felt intense relief that no one had appeared to observe him. There then
followed a poignant mood reminiscent of post-coital melancholy and a brooding sense of the brevity of human existence. (Years later 'Tubby' would discover poems from Ancient Greece which recorded the same emotional turbulence.)
On reaching Marcus Milligan's small-holding - a small-holding which prefab residents always thought of as a large-holding - 'Tubby' noticed that the local branch of the International Situationists had been hard at work. (They were soon to make it big in Brussels and Paris.) The branch's black and gold paint brush had emblazoned a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) on the fence behind the red telephone kiosk. 'Tubby' Lard was taken aback by what he saw. He wondered whether his outrageous 'Tom Jones' outburst in Twiverton High Street had been observed be someone after all.

"A joke is an epitaph on the death of feeling."

THIRTEEN

2009-08-18T09:56:00.021+01:00

Twiverton is not just famous for being "very old". It is also famous for being the place where the 18th century novelist Henry Fielding wrote Tom Jones (1749). The house he once lived in was still standing in the village until 1963.

Henry Fielding (1707-54): "Read in order to live."

The City Fathers could have converted Fielding's house into a visitors' centre to rival that of the Brontes in Haworth. Coachloads of Japanese tourists could have been accommodated in the car park of the nearby football ground. Instead they chose to raze it to the ground and build a retirement home for casino owners from Florida in its place.
The tourist revenue could have funded the very things that Twiverton lacks: an open-air swimming pool, tennis courts, a concert hall, a library, and some well stocked shops. However
Pete O'Clarke's old man (resident of prefab number number twelve) says that a boost in tourism is the very last thing which this place needs. "Just look what it has done to Bath! The place has become a traffic polluted cesspool!" For Pete O'Clarke's old man the beauty of life in forgotten places like Twiverton is that people are forced to rely on their own creative resources. As he told a reporter from the Bath & Wilting: "Being in the sticks promotes self-reliance and the inner cultivation of the self. After doing a course at Bath Technical College some young 'uns want to turn this place into flaming Hampstead! The whole point of The Twiverton Way is that you have to find The Path yourself."
You would never know from watching Pete O'Clarke's old man put on his oil-stained overalls and wriggle under his motor bike and side-car to carry out vital mechanical repairs that he is a leading practitioner of Daoism, the two thousand year old Chinese religion/philosophy renowned for unlocking the secrets of wu wei (action through inaction or effortless effort.) When he spotted some kids trying to move a massive boulder which had fallen into the middle of Pennyquick Brook he told them to leave it well alone. The words he spoke on that day have made a lasting impression on everyone. "Just hang on a moment, lads, and wait. It will only be a matter of time before the force of the water has reduced that massive boulder to a tiny pebble." Such are the fruits of effortless effort!
Pete O'Clarke's old man's decision to build a weightlifting gym in his back yard - the one that was to be the springboard for so many prefab youth joining the legendary Le Club Musculation -was also prompted by Daoist insights. Breath training and cultivation of the martial arts was a central part of the gym's daily routine. "Breathe slowly, sharpen your thinking, move with deliberation, read up on both the philosophy of the East and the West, and soon you will be on course for finding The Way!"

TWELVE

2009-08-17T14:43:00.026+01:00

Some people like to make prefabs the butts of cheap jokes, but prefabs themselves are not cheap. When the prefab building programme was launched in 1944 the annual cost was £150 million. A thousand pounds was needed to buy just one prefab!
Leaf through the glossy pages of Prefab World and you will find that some prefabs have walls that are smooth and straight while other prefabs have walls that are wavy and corrugated. Some prefabs have roofs that are flat while others have roofs that slope. Some prefabs have front doors positioned bang in the centre while others have front doors positioned near one of the ends. Some prefab estates are connected by long roads while others are connected by small footpaths. Some estates are mega-complexes with more than two hundred prefabs while others are micro-clusters with less than forty. What a lush variety of forms are denoted by the 'prefab' word! The universe has just eleven dimensions while in Britain alone there are thirteen different prefab types. If you were lucky enough to win a short break in a prefab you could find yourself padding around anything from a Hamish (type 1 or type 2), a Duplex Sheath, a Bricket Wood Special, a Blackburn Orlit to a Foamed Slag!
Prefab evolution has largely followed the Darwinian principle of 'survival of the flattest'. Continued turbulence in the atmosphere means that the 'AIROH Aluminium Bungalows' on our estate (AIROH is an acronym for 'Aircraft Industries Research Organisation in Housing') are getting a little bit flatter every day. A banner now links Newtin and Woodhedge Roads which proclaims "We Are Proud Of Our AIROHs!" Brass nameplates engraved with the words Airoh House Residence are making dazzling one up-manship appearances on front doors. Plans are afoot to explore different facets of our prefab world and holiday exchanges are being arranged with those who reside in Spooner, Universal, and Uni-Seco prefabs. After all:

"What do they know of prefabs who only one prefab knows?"

Until very recently the itinerary of Twiverton's 'Roaming City Coach Company' was confined to the usual suspects - to places like Cheddar Gorges, Spooky Hole, Weston-Super-Mud, the Minehole Holiday Camp, and the Lion Tamer's House at Leatlong. However people now hanker for wider horizons. In the Summer after next there will be guided tours to the Tarrans prefabs of Hull, the Phoenixs of Bristol, and the Arcons of Newport! The Bath & Wilting says our estate is poised to pip the Georgian city of Bath at the post and win the UNESCO World Heritage Site
status it so richly deserves.

ELEVEN

2009-08-15T16:28:00.019+01:00

It is not accurate to claim - as many do - that "all prefabs look the same." Take the ones on our own estate. (This is a cue for 'no one else will!') Although every prefab has been made to the same standard specifications, each one cultivates its own very distinctive persona. Some prefabs remain in a smooth, pristine blotch-less condition for years on end and manage to retain the fresh-faced vitality of their earliest days. Thee have gilded paths which are gently caressed by the sweet scent of roses. Others begin to give off a pungent body odour within days of their being constructed and quickly become pockmarked with all kinds of odd and oily looking substances. Stains of a most suspicious kind are streaked across their rusting lower firmaments, and stray hounds on the look out for hospitable terrains feel compelled to anoint them at regular intervals.
One of the prefabs which has had more stray hound dog visits than most is prefab number twenty-five. Its first residents enjoyed climbing in through their next door neighbour's kitchen window and hurling plates and cutlery into the back garden. There was sweet relief all round when they moved to Bristol when the eldest son was signed up as a goalkeeper by the Black Arabs football club. The sweet relief was not to last for long. It dissipated the moment the new residents were seen moving in. The new residents were the Swileys!
Reviewers in the Sunday supplements and the literary press have to date not said a single harsh word about The Prefab Files. (This is not too surprising given that they are oblivious to its existence.) However it is not hard to imagine what their criticisms would be. "The Prefab Files are saturated with archaic nostalgia and soft-lensed romanticism. They have the gall to ooze a paste of pseudo-magical realism on to the dull, tedious repressed life of a 1950s' prefab estate in a parochial Somerset outpost and portray it as some kind of lost Golden Age!" This might well be true if we had said nothing in The Files about the Swileys. Yet evade the Swileys we have not. We have confronted their presence head-on. And we have recognised that ours was not the only prefab estate in the country which had its Swileys!

TEN

2009-08-12T15:07:00.029+01:00

Benny Hills - our "fastest in the west" milkman - is something of a legend. He does not just deliver milk to the fifty households on our estate - he delivers philosophy as well. "Are you going to stay with Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ?" (1921) he said to Ernie Flynn's mum at prefab number fifteen - "or is it time to switch to the less opaque and creamy Blue Book (1933)?"
You can always tell when Benny has been burning the midnight oil with The Critique of Pure Reason (1781). What a racket his milk bottles make! The strain of combining milk delivery with logical positivism really got to him one Monday morning. He was seen gripping hold of the lapels of Swiley's jacket at prefab number twenty-five and shouting: "For pity's sake man, what exactly do you mean when you say you want a pint of milk? If you don't start defining your terms and making your assumptions explicit you will be getting buggar all!" It was not for the cooling David Hume ointment he periodically rubs into his forehead and various sensitive empirical parts his entire world-view would have been made redundant years ago.
As well as being adept at detecting new trends in philosophy the prefabs' milkman is something of an authority on new movements in architecture as well. On his very first round here he was singing the praises of "the noble Euclidian simplicity of the rectangular prefab." Nowadays he tells everyone that its straight-lined days are numbered. He tells us that on the other side of the Atlantic R. Buckminster Fuller is poised to persuade the Beech Aircraft Company to produce prefabs which are dome-shaped and circular. He has seen the future and it is circular!

R.Buckminster Fuller: "Man knows so much and does so little."

Leaf through the pages of the Burlington Magazine of Connoisseurs (the most coveted publication on our estate) and you can soon realise that the circling of the rectangle has become The Big Architectural Question Of The Day. To quote from the last editorial: "The conventional rectangular prefab is losing its classic chic look - as any visitors to Twiverton will know." According to the followers of Buckminster Fuller the domed shaped prefab will lead to its demise." Neither Big Band Glenn Miller music or rectangular prefabs can stay fashionable for ever.

A shed is a building, a cathedral is architecture, but a prefab is design!"

NINE

2009-08-11T11:01:00.037+01:00

Between 1945 and 1949 around 160,000 rectangular prefabs were assembled into place. At the peak of the Great Prefab Boom a new one was going up every twelve minutes! It has to be acknowledged that the kudos of renting a prefab went to some people's heads. Some residents saw themselves as a kind of reserve aristocracy in waiting. (The size of the British aristocracy at this time - 157,000 households - was about the same as the prefab population.) So if the Duke and Duchess of Somerset keeled over the Bollards at prefab number four would be ready to take their place. A sense of being one of the elect stayed with prefab dwellers until the end.
The reputation of Aneurin Bevan (Member of Parliament for Tredegar/Ebbw Vale from 1929 to 1960) plummeted when - in a speech launching the National Health Service in 1948 -he
described the Tories as "lower than vermin." An even greater blow to his reputation came when after he described prefabs as "chicken huts" and "rabbit hutches." The author of In Place Of Fear (1952) seemed to have little inking that the prefabs had come In Place Of Fear. Perhaps Bevan simply wanted prefabs to be bigger and of a higher quality, but his words acted as a blow to prefab dwellers' amour-propre.
When Admiralty civil servants were moved from London to Bath it was on the strict Bevanite understanding that none of them would end up having to live in a prefab. A reporter from the Bath & Wilting discovered that a number of them were renting out the houses they owned in London at the same time as they were renting spacious council houses in Twiverton. He was told that on no account should this be made public. (How many dark secrets have been kept by the Bath & Wiltings of Britains's local press!)
Harold Wilson, a future Labour Prime Minister, said he had given up reading Das Kapital (1867) after finishing finishing the first chapter. At least he would have read the book's preface which tells readers there is no "royal road" to science. And there is no "royal road" to understanding the Zen Of Prefab Life. Hundreds of evenings have to be spent staring into the embers of the coal fire and watching reflected slivers of moonlight flicker dance on the sitting-room wall before one gains an appreciation of the spiritually expansive nature of these pale and compact architectural forms. The weight of Bevan's workload and the unrelenting attacks to which he was subjected meant that this truth remained hidden from him.
Another pity of those times is that George Orwell never got round to writing The Great Prefab Novel. What a mistake he made in spending his final days in the bleak winter of 1950 marooned in an isolated cottage on the windswept Scottish island of Jura. If only he had been recuperating his health on our prefab estate in Twiverton and mulling things over in the comfort of the My Full Moon. Yet there is a forgotten prefab dimension to Orwell's last book (published in 1949). The message of 1984 is just how impoverished life would be if the small pockets of freedom symbolised by prefabs were to vanish away.

EIGHT

2009-08-10T16:26:00.028+01:00

Prefabs only went up because other houses had gone down. Between July 1940 and March 1945 half a million homes were flattened and a quarter of a million badly damaged. Twiverton got off quite lightly during the war (not that the twenty-seven Twivertonians some of the bombs landed on would agree.) The Railway Inn and the parochial school were annihiliated, but no one was inside them at the time.
A prime target for Adolf Schicklgruber's bombers was the major port and industrial centre which lies ten miles to the west of Twiverton. Over fourteen hundred people died during the Bristol Blitz. Bath's turn came during the Baedecker raids on historic cities. This was 'revenge' for the RAF's bombing of Lubeck on the 28th and 29th March 1942. The bombing of Bath on April 25th and 26th 1942 left four hundred and seventeen people dead. Schicklgruber's bombers had a clear run as the pilots at near-by RAF Colerne had been sent away on week-end leave!
'Ozzie' Oster's mum was in Bristol when it was being blitzed. Some of the pilots who were dropping bombs on her could have been from her home town of Koblenz. Some of her old friends and neighbours would have watched her mother being taken to Koblenz Railway Station and sent off to the Belzec death camp.

"When you've got friends and neighbours, All the world is a happy place." (The Billy Cotton Band song.)

One night 'Ossie's mum felt too tired to make it to the air raid shelter. It received a direct hit, and the couple from next door were killed. Then she moved to Bath and arrived just in time for the bombing there. Fortunately the bombs missed her. But unfortunately the polio germs lingering in her bomb-damaged flat did not.

George Orwell: "As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying
overhead, trying to kill me."

SEVEN

2009-08-10T11:21:00.018+01:00

Down our way the term 'the old man' is used to refer to your father. It denotes admiration and not disrespect.
Sinc ethe early 1950s the old man has been working as a furnace bricklayer for a Dutch company with an HQ in Rotterdam called Derro Enamels. His trowel has been taken all over the Continent ("Harwich for the Continent, Frinton for the Incontinent"), and sweat from his brow has fertilised the soil of France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Finland, Yugoslavia, Portugal, Rumania, and Italy. According to his Derro manager Turkey will be the lucky next recipient of dollops of his salt-scented perspiration.
The postcards sent back to the prefab are lined up on the mantelpiece. Most are black and white, but now and again there is one which is in full colour and with curled edges as well. Typical postcard views show villages nestling under mountains or people strolling around splendid city squares. It is clear that the old man has a special liking for ones which show grand buildings such as opera houses and concert halls. When you look at them it is hard to believe that - just a few years ago - this was a continent which was being soaked in the blood of mass slaughter!
The writing on the back of the postcards is always in blue biro and in neat capital letters. On the right-hand side is our address:

24 Newtin Road
Twiverton
Somerset
England/Inghilterra

On the left-hand side will be one of the following phrases. Either "LOVE FROM ME" or "ALL GOES WELL."

SIX

2009-08-09T13:01:00.032+01:00

'Nuclear Bomb Exploded!', 'Communist Troops Advance In Korea!', 'Nasser Takes Over Suez Canal!, 'Budapest In Flames!', 'No More National Service!' These fragments of history have been sent richocheting around the estate by dozens of black-dialled wireless sets. By the time the Daily Mirror lands on our door-mat (even though it carries the tension-packed Garth cartoon strip) the sense of being on the cutting-edge of history as it is happening has faded away. By the time evening draws in and we are leafing through the Bath & Wilting the edge of excitement has been almost completely blunted away.
Our wireless set is the most draught-free corner of the sitting-room ('the north-west passage'.) This is where we huddle round and listen to nerve-tingling episodes of Take It From Here and the charismatic Eth and Ron (1948 - 1961), to Dick Barton - Special Agent! (people still cannot believe how it was taken off air in 1952), Jet Morgan's Journey Into Space (launched back in 1953), epic football matches such as Wolverhampton Wanderers' 3-2 victory over the Hungarian champions Honved in 1954, and - from 1951 on - (provided you could find the elusive 208 metres wave band) the latest hit-songs from Radio Luxembourg. If the old man is around he will shout "Turn that dirge off!" from his sofa bunk. Unless, that is, the silky charmed voice of 'Horace Batchelor' is slithering down the ether. The words of Horace hold everyone in their spell. In the days before Horace walked on history's stage K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m was a Nondescript Someplace Somewhere Town known only for its chocolate factory (as well as the lewd gnomes on display in its suburban gardens.) That all changed when the inventor of the 'infra-dig' method of winning fortunes on the football pools took Radio Luxembourg listeners by storm. As soon as the K word was spoken (with each of its eight illustrious letters repeated in turn) the spirit of Saint Keyne - founder of the settlement of Keynsham back in the fifth century - begins to emanate out of the swirling mist.
There have always been a few sour and discordant voices who whsper that K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m only left its imprint on the map of world consciousness in order to ensure that tens of thousands of 'Big Pools Win' seeking postal orders safely winged their way into Horace's K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m post office account. Yet Horace was a "most sincerely, folks!" Hughie Green kind of guy who -from 1948 on - (when the secret of the 'infra-dig' method first was first unveiled to an astonished world) - poured out twelve million pounds from out of his own Post Office account and into the coffers of the downtrodden masses. (How much stayed in Horace's own coffers is what air cadets are told to call a "known unknown".)
Today the word 'Batch' has come to be used as a shorthand term for 'Batchelor'. It denotes the musty and rather off-putting odour that batchelors who refrain from washing their bed linen, socks and under-garments are said to reek of. (According to Mr M. Amis members of the 'Batch' fraternity always prefer black to white underpants as they stay cleaner for so much longer.)
The Radio Luxembourg broadcasts of Horace Batch had their downside. it is said they helped promote the deluded myth that a win on the football pools is enough to ensnare the Goddess of Happiness. Yet who could deny that those distant post-war years would have worn a far more sombre look without the K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m incantations of the world famousHorace Batch.

FIVE

2009-08-08T13:10:00.025+01:00

Only a select few have ever had the privilege of seeing the inside of a prefab. Countless numbers regularly troop around palaces and stately homes and country houses, but the viewing of prefab interiors is (like the private quarters of 10 Downing Street) strictly by personal invitation only.
Visitors to our 1950s' prefab would be escorted into the sitting-room. (Socially aspiring types called it the living-room.) You would have seen an African wood carving from Southern Rhodesia; a wooden stool which looked as if it had been taken from van Gogh's room in Arles; an elegant lampstand "Weimar style" according to Pete O'Clarke's old man); an Escalado horse race set (the same horse never won twice in a row); a robot with plasticine eyes made out of Meccano); a jug the old had been given given by the owner of the Albergo Ristorante 'Continental' Bassano Grappo (he said it had been the best place he had ever stayed in); a plastic Airfix model of a lethal Japanese Zero fighter plane; a gyroscope which kept on spinning; a silver bell from a souvenir shop in Brussels; and a music box with a haunting melody which reminded everyone of Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949) film. This aesthetic configuration would have even impressed Erno Goldfinger, the Hungarian architect who was a leading authority on prefab design and was so cruelly maligned in Ian Fleming's James Bond novel.
Even now I feel guilty about the football pitch markings that were scratched on to the once-smooth surface of the sitting-room table. Chiselling away at the secrets of Prefab Land (circa. 1957) has plenty of drawbacks, but it is a big advance on chiselling away at the surface of our
only polished table. The landlord of the Martello Tower Bar says it was a yearning to chisel away at the secrets of Dublin (circa. 1904) that made James Joyce go into exile in Trieste and Paris. He made sure he put a copy of the Dublin street guide into his travel bag. At this very moment someone driven by the same compulsion could be placing a copy of Kelly's Guide to Bath into their travel bag. Without a street map and a spell of exile it is impossible to make sense of the life you have left behind.

FOUR

2009-08-08T12:24:00.033+01:00

Our prefab is in Twiverton. Go back twenty life spans ago and it was the Rman colony of Twivertonium. A sense of antiquity pervades every nook and cranny. Hardly a month goes by without someone digging up a Roman coffin in their back garden!
In Nicolaus Pevsner's guide to 'North Somerset and Bristol' no less than one third of a page is devoted just to Twiverton! (Admittedly this falls short of the forty-eight pages on Bath, but as Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic of prefab number one points out "it was quite impossible for Pevsner to miss us out." The one third of a page gives special mentions to the suspension bridge (1837) and the "gloomy-looking" jail (1843).
In Anglo-Saxon times Twiverton was known as Weir Town, and even today you can hear some people using this name. (Although they make the mistake of calling it Weird Town.) Twiverton's assets were sizeable enough to gain a mention in the Doomsday Book. Since then its name has changed a number of times. It has been known as 'Two-ford-town' (which is what 'Twiverton' originally means) and in 1876 it was officially re-named 'Twiverton-on-Avon'. The slick salesman
in the corner prefab sees this as a great missed opportunity. "If only it had been re-named 'Twiverton-upon-Avon' we would be up there with Stratford-upon-Avon and Kingston-upon-Hull."
However adding the word 'Avon' on to Twiverton was not motivated by anything as sordid and shallow as social climbing. It was a desperate last-ditch attempt to stop letters being sent by mistake to Tiverton in Devon. This is something which continues to this day.

Send us our letters back, you pillaging piratical Devonian Tivertonians!

Twiverton is global or it is nothing, and it was at the cutting edge of the industrial revolution. This was where - in 1792 - 'Blue Dye' Bamford and Cooke's opened up their famous mill. The tag of 'Blue Dye' was a result of the blue stains the mill workers ended up being covered with. At least they had jobs to go to. The mill destroyed the livelihoods of the home-based weavers and this left a legacy of political radicalism which survives (in a ghostly form) to this day. While labour historians continue to honour places like 'Red Maerdy/Little Moscow', Chopwell and the Vale of Leven, few of them make reference to 'Tenacious Twiverton'. And it was from 'Tenacious Twiverton' that in 1839 a heavy squad was dispatched to Weston village in support of a Chartist 'votes for the workers!' rally. (Or a 'votes for workers of the male gender' rally.) Even today, members of the Global Ruling Class will turn pale and their hands tremble at the mention of the sans culottes of Twiverton!
In 1840 Twiverton village was sliced open by the building of the Great Western Railway. Train passengers started to glimpse just how bad things were here. Food collections were soon being organised by churches in Bath, and there were times in the 'hungry forties' when it was touch and go whether Twiverton would pull through.
TAOTG (The Age Of Technological Genocide) could yet wipe our species out for good. Three years before a bullet in Sarajavo officially launched the start of TAOTG Mr Edward Hutton had his book published. It was called Highways and Byways in Somerset (1911). This book has never been on sale in any bookshop in Twiverton. This is not simply beacuse there have never been any bookshiops in Twiverton. It is because Edward Hutton's book included the following infamous line: "Twiverton is not to be altogether despised, for it is very old."
Once upon a time residents who lived in grand houses in Georgian crescents and squares would purse their lips and adopt a sniffy tone of voice if the word 'Twiverton' came up in conversation. (Nowadays they ensure it never does.)
In 1805 Jane Austen went on what she called a "pleasant walk" to Twiverton.
Being "a good egg" (a favourite term of the old man) she did not mention despising anything.

THREE

2009-08-07T10:59:00.031+01:00

Having no upstairs (this is the cue for "in more ways than one") gives prefab residents their well-grounded sense of self and identity. Originally these pale constructions were expected to last for ten years at most. This faint hearted deadline was passed yonks ago! The quality of prefab design means that they could be standing tall (well, in a manner of speaking) for ten times that long. All that is needed are a few reinforcements for their walls and roofs and a decent heating system.
Not that you are going to hear any bragging about the famed longevity of prefabs just at the moment. The authorities have offered us the chance of moving into real council houses with upstairs lavatories! No wonder everyone has suddenly gone stum. It took about three nano-seconds to look this gift horse in the mouth. Now worn-out pieces of lino and the finest Formica tables are being heaped on to a giant bonfire. Scrap metal merchants just have to shout out "Any" (without adding "old irons!") before they are overwhelmed with largesse.
Of course moving residents out of the prefabs and stripping the landscape of these thin-slivered
pale constructions will be the easy part. Taking the prefabs out of the residents will be a much trickier affair. A yearning to return has been buried deep inside our psyches. One day it will force its way out and explode into the daylight as a forest of glorious sunflowers.
It is not that long ago that the ever-restless 'Ossie' Oster of prefab number seventeen could not wait to get the hell out of this place. He now seems to be having second thoughts. The other night he was heard screaming something out in his sleep. Most of it was unintelligible, but there were some half-remembered words from Gustave Flaubert. Stuff that the scrap metal merchants would appreciate about cracked kettles, beating out tunes for bears to dance to, and longing to move the stars to pity.
"Cheer up, Ossie!" someone said to him the next day when he was looking a bit rough. "After all - when you look at the coming demolition in the broader scheme of things - a prefab is just a heap of asbestos, aluminium, and a few 'any old irons'. And some 'gossamer, feathers, air'."

TWO

2009-08-07T09:32:00.030+01:00

The "to those that hath shall be given" principle (Matthew 13: 12) is seldom nudged to one side. But this is what happened in the aftermath of the 1939-45 war. People who would otherwise have been left permanently homeless found themselves living in temporary homes. For those who were stuck in dingy basement flats or marooned in ex-army barracks the offer of a key to a prefab was like manna from heaven.
In May 1944 a newly unveiled prefab started to make a public exhibition of itself in the Tate Gallery. Tens of thousands of prefabs were soon being connected to water mains and electricity cables up and down the country. There was even some wild, science fiction-style futuristic talk of having them connected to telephone lines!
Britain's prefabs were fighters from the word go, not least because the aluminium in their walls and roofs had been taken from war planes. Cities which had been bombed the most like Coventry and Hull were given the most prefabs. Not far from the front of the queue for the new prefabs came cities like Bristol and Bath.
The central aim of the 1944 Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act was to provide "a temporary solution to the post-war housing shortage." Not everyone wanted a solution to be found for the post-war housing shortage. After all, while should aluminium be wated on plebs and peasants at a time when country houses had leaks in their bow wings and crumbling porticos! Building prefab estates instead of restoring country estates was an afront to the enemies of aesthetic vandalism and cultural barbarism. No wonder Arthur Evelyn St John Waugh launched a ferocious counter attack. On March 13 1944 he wrote the following lines to his friend Lady Dorothy Lygon:

"I am writing a very beautiful book, to bring tears, about very rich people, beautiful, high born people who live in palaces and have no troubles except what they make themselves and these are mainly the demons of sex and drink which after all are easy to bear as troubles go nowadays."

No tears have been brought to anyone's eyes by a beautiful book about prefabs. Here was a 'Brideshead' that was neither visited or revisited or even noticed by the literary elite. No film or television producer would ever demean himself by setting up camp on a prefab estate. No artist of any acclaim would set up an easel here, no composer of music would dream of casting a look in their direction. Prefabs were ignored when they were around and forgotten after they had been
swept away. But here -on a crumbling ledge in a faint margin of memory - a hand is lifted to salute them!

Postscript: Evelyn Waugh's wife managed to get hold of three bananas for their children during the war. ('Yes, we do have some bananas!') Her beautiful high-born husband sat down in front of the children, peeled the bananas, poured cream and sugar on them, and than ate all three. When it came to bringing tears to people's eyes he was in a league of his own.

ONE

2009-07-29T16:41:00.041+01:00

You can bet your bottom dollar no one else has bought a note-book to jot these events down. The rest of them have far too many things to do. After all, the day of The Big Move is not far off. A grizzly-chinned demolition squad has been assembled, and its advance squad has started putting smudges of crimson paint on everyone's front door. Soon the entire estate - this precious time-capsule from the Ration Book era - will have been knocked to smithereens.
Within hours of the pistol shot of the new reality being fired off nothing will be left here apart from memories, vague memories.
It is not just fifty prefabs that will vanish. Before you can say 'Jack Robinson' the hedges and lawns will have gone as well, along with secret hideaways, water butts the colour of dynamite, yellow coalhouse which could double as bomb shelters, yards of floppy metal fences with holes for nipping under, and gardens filled to the brim with proletarian cabbages and bourgeois cauliflowers. A tide of tarmac will sweep over the greens on which a thousand sporting battles were fought, and freshly-painted No Ball Games Allowed! signs will be hoisted into place to snap away at the heels of childhood.
The faces chalked up on kerbstones are putting a brave face on it all. They know that every
planet and every sun and every slice of history will end up being hurled into the bottomless quarry of lost time. That is the way the cosmic biscuit crumbles! Come back here in six months time and you will see that two-storey high blocks of flats will have risen up like concrete phoenixes from our prefabs' burial ground. And they will have little Mediterranean-style balconies as well!