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People just could not believe that a Prefab Philosophy Club had been set up on our estate. When
news of its existence got out we were besieged by newspaper reporters (plus an odd character from the wireless who claimed to know Radio Luxemburgh's Horace Batchelor) for days on end. Almost exactly a year later - this was bang in the middle of the conference we were running on
'The Conceptual Innovations of Wittgenstein and Spinoza' - our estate was besieged yet again. (Gary Bollard had told the Bath & Wilting Chronicle that Spinoza would be the star speaker without realising he had died some time ago). Even when the gentlemen of the press saw the doyen of logical positvism turn up from Wadham College to deliver a paper on Language, Truth and Logical Falsehoods the big wide world continued to suspect us of being up to some devious ploy. The deeply-ingrained assumption of all the powers-that-be was that prefabs and
philosophy -like oil and water - simply could not mix.
Dozens of Prefab Philosophy Clubs must have been set up in the nineteen fifties. We were never under any illusions about there being anything special about the intellectual terrain of our own estate. (Although the influence exerted by Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic in prefab number three cannot be totally discounted). That said, Jane Lewis in prefab number thirteen - who regularly burns the midnight oil reading the works of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) - has now come round to questioning the idea that there really is such a thing as pure chance!
Over recent months speculation on the origins of our Prefab Philosophy Club has reached an unprecedented level of intensity, and no one in Twiverton was surprised to hear that the New York Revue Of Books is to commission a joint team from Princeton and Harvard to carry out a definitive investigation. Perhaps the time has come for someone who was actually present at
the club's founding meeting to set the record straight and help untangle the web of mythology that has accumulated over the years.
According to the orthodox standard version the idea of setting up a Prefab Philosophy Club surfaced after six of us had finished an over-vigorous football penalty-taking practice session against the large black metal gate that stands at the top of Woodhedge Road. As far as this background setting is concerned the orthodox standard version is absolutely correct. The orthodox standard version is also correct in stating that our group ended up sprawling out of the pavement, gazing up at a bright blue sky, and watching a solitary shining cloud in the shape of the British Isles hover directly above us. And the orthodox standard version is also correct in stating that someone - it was in fact 'Tubby' Lard - remarked of the cloud's semi-hallucinatory silver-glowing form: "It is as if the Gods have ripped out our country's page from their atlas of the world and magnified it a thousand times!" From this point on, however, the orthodox standard version gets it quite wrong.
Ann Brown-Sloane did not experience the shining hovering cloud as "a numinous epiphany!" or as some versions have it "a transcendental meeting up of Joan of Arc and William Blake!" Our small platoon did not draw in a deep breath, feel an idea palpably gestate out of the enchanted evening air, and spring to its feet vowing to shake British philosophy out of its insular torpor and show the Continentals how real philosophy should be done. The idea of setting up a Prefab Philosophy Club did not come on the evening of our over-vigorous penalty-taking practice session at all! As for the impact made by the solitary shining cloud in the shape of the British Isles we had all but forgotten about it until being reminded of its brief transitory existence in that celebrated Home Service wireless broadcast Principia Prefabrica: New Ideas From The Ivory Towers of Twiverton.
In fact the spark which ignited the idea of founding a Prefab Philosophy Club did not come until a full twenty-four hours after our over-vigorous penalty practice on Woodhedge Road had ended! The First Cause of our novel venture was not some epiphany heralded by the chance appearance of a silver cloud in the shape of the British Isles. It was 'Tubby' Lard standing in the queue at the 5A bus stop and hearing the distinguished editor of the Twiverton Literary Supplement (TLS) remark that the life led by residents on our prefab estate was "risibly claustrophobic!" Not "poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short" (which would have been reasonable enough) but "risibly claustrophobic!"

One of the great advantages about having rows with foreigners is that you have them on the defensive from the word go. After all, what are they doing in this country anyway! Voicing the great rallying cry of "Go back to your own country!" gives the likes of the Swileys untold pleasure.
This is not to to suggest that anti-foreigner jibes are often heard on this estate. For one thing not many foreigners live here. There is a sprinkling of Welshmen (who are by definition 'foreigners' since 'Welsh' is Saxon for 'foreigner'), plus a chap from Malta, a Jewish refugee from Germany, and a Pakistani family who are liked by everyone bar the Swileys. In a time-battered
terraced house that stands next to the super-highway known as the Lower Bristol Road there lives a lean, tough, agile looking woman who has close-cropped hair. She fought with the Polish resistance during the war. You can bet your bottom dollar the Swileys are not going to say "Go back to your own country!" to her.
For ninety-five percent of the time the prefab estate is a haven of good will and international understanding. But now and again, completely out of the blue, a malign incident of the anti-foreigner kind can blow up out of nothing. Take the regretable sequence of events that followed the scrap between the ever-sulky Ronnie Rogers who lives in prefab number forty-three and the "I want to be a taxi driver!" Mark Marshall who lives in prefab number fifteen. No one is really sure what sparked it all off. The documentation is thin and there is no clear-cut photographic evidence of the kind which shows Franz Ferdinand being assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914. The most plausible historical analysis suggests that Ronnie Rogers was hit for six by Martin Marshall during an improvised cricket match - and took it badly. Harsh words were spoken and within a blink of an eye a bitter inter-clan and publicly-aired dispute was being unleashed in the middle of Woodhedge Road. Even the driver of the ever frantic Co-operative Mobile Shop Van ("Share number 24419!") came to a brake-crunching halt in order to discover what was going on. After the initial burst of small arms fire personal abuse had been exhausted one of the big guns of the estate - Ronnie Roger's - was seen to enter the fray. Her arms were rigidly folded over a bright red apron showing pictures of cuddly teddy bears and her hair was in curlers. (The double pincer image of hair in curlers and cuddly teddy bears always spells big trouble). The lethal anti-foreigner card was played when Ronnie Roger's mum plucked two vitally relevant pieces of judiciously-weighed evidence out of the left holster of her cuddly teddy bear apron pocket. These exposed the outrageously illegitimate manner - tantamount her supporters say to an act of war - in which the unquestionably indigenous Ronnie Rogers had been hit for six by that treacherous outsider Martin Marshall.
Item One drawn out of the apron holster was the fact that Martin's mum and dad had been born in the Irish Republic (and in Cork as well!) Item Two was even more incriminating: it is a fact that the Irish Republic pursued a policy of neutality during the second world war! Put these two items together and the following devastating deduction can be made. Geo-politically speaking Martin Marshall was complicit with the Nazi war effort. This meant that Ronnie Rogers had been grievously wronged by someone who hits weak bowlers for six without due cause.

The old man has an uncanny knack of being able to walk into a betting shop and place money on a horse that is destined to come in second. Unfortunately he always bets that the horse will come in first.
Over the years money has been regularly siphoned out of our modest rented prefab abode and into the splendid detached house owned by the There Is One Born Every Minute bookmaker. The old man remains serenely philosophical about the financial costs exacted by horse race betting on our domestic economy and says it is "just a bit of fun." It certainly is a bit of fun for the bookmaker.
On Saturday mornings the oldman joins a small platoon of betting enthusiasts in either the Saracen's Head, the Green Tree, the Empire Bar or (more often than not) Smith's Wine Vaults. At half hour intervals eighty-six year old Harold - the oldest and physically most precarious member of the group - is hurriedly dispatched to the There Is One Born Every Minute bookies with a clutch of betting slips shaking in his trembling hands. A quotation from Immanuel Kant has been painted on one of the walls of the betting shop:

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 not many startled pauses in Smith's Wine Vaults).

Once we were awoken from our late afternoon slumbers by an enormous thud against the front door. It was followed by the spectacular sight of the old man dragging a brand new multi-layered Persian carpet into the sitting room. His system had 'worked' again - the chosen horse had come in second - but this time the 'winning' horse had been disqualified.
Even a modest sized win by a member of the Smith's Wine Vaults platoon triggers a switch into nostalgia mode. The group's founders - Arthur, Monty, and Harold - will recall the momentous day when the entire wad of Jim Smith's rent money was placed on a rank outsider called Rent Boy which - of course - won by a mile. The majority of horse race betters dream of 'A Big Win' which will enable them to sup ale not just on Saturdays but on week-day afternoons as well. However the Smith's Wine Vaults platoon takes a more balanced and pragmatic stance. They dream of a sequence of modest wins which will leave their existing style of life essentially undisturbed but provide them with an extra helping of largesse.
Arthur is a postman, Monty a hospital porter, and Jim a civil servant ('industrial grade'). Whenever a referee's name is required for some official form 'civil servant (industrial grade)' comes to the rescue. For the last thirty years Jim Smith has worked at a top secret Ministry of Defence underground arms depot (unmarked on any maps) that lies six miles to the east of Bath. It has been designated as a reserve bunker for key Government personnel in the event of a nuclear attack. During the second world war Jim Smith was taken to one side by the authorities and warned to "watch his step." His hard-heeled shoes always make a piercing rat-tat-tat sound as he paces corridors and pavements - you can hear his approach a mile off - and he had been half expecting to be told that the noise of his heels had been getting on the authorities' wick. In fact the infuriating rat-tat-tat sounds did not even get a mention. The severe reprimand he was given was for making remarks about the German origins of the Royal Family.
Before moving into his present flat in inner city Walcot (his neighbours are newcomers from the Caribbean) Jim Smith lived on the grand Blackway Estate which overlooks Twiverton. On Saturday mornings he would rat-tat-tat his way down the hill, call into our prefab for a smoke and a cup of tea, and then head off towards one of the neighbouring town's watering holes. Prior to taking his "egress" (as Laurel and Hardy like to say) he would remove 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 became as predictable as the water butt filling up after a heavy downpour of rain. However a Saturday morning arrived when Jim Smith donned his overcoat and was half way out of the back door without a backwards glance or even a hint of giving the obligatory cash donation. Custom and precedent cannot be flouted in this way! He even had the nerve to look offended when I shouted out "Got any money then!"
Despite this faux-pas Jim Smith continues to allow his name to be used as a referee or witness in any 'official applications. He is one of the few people known in our circle who holds the coveted 'professional' (albeit industrial grade) status that the authorities require. The Dublin-born Jim Smith also acts as a referee/witness on Britain's political record in Ireland. Drinkers in Smith's Wine Vaults have learned a lot about the dark side of Oliver Cromwell and the atrocities carried out at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649. "For people in Ireland these events took place just three
lifespans ago !" he says. (He was using the Twiverton "one life span = one hundred years rule"). Once Jack Paisley from Belfast looked into Smith's Wine Vaults and there was an acrimonious debate which had glasses clinking nervously on the bar. According to Paisley Cromwell's actions had been "reprisals" for the massacres of 1641 when thousands of Anglo-Scottish Protestant settlers had been slaughtered).
You might think that someone like Jim Smith would be inclined to empathise with the plight of other peoples who have been subjected to the torments of colonial domination. But it never seems to work like that. The downtrodden get akick out of keeping others who are downtrodden downtrodden.
"Pass over the race page and pipe down!" said the old man in the Empire Bar after Jim Smith's talk about his inner city neighbours had taken a turn for the worse. "Or I will put a pound on that horse called Oliver Cromwell!"

No election posters have ever been glued up on the windows of prefab number forty-eight, and its coalhouse door has always remained brazenly bare. Ever since 1957 a special aura has enveloped prefab number forty-eight. Any thing as prosaic as an election poster - even a collector's item such as 'Vote for Gilbert Youth and World Government!' with its picture of the surf rolling in on a beach in Hawii - would detract from the prefab's special mystique. There is something quite unique about prefab number forty-eight, and it is not too hard to pin the source of this uniqueness down. Prefab number forty-eight has four residents, and one of them is a certain Miss Ann Brown-Sloane.
If any election posters were ever to go on display in Miss Ann Brown-Sloane's prefab her favoured prospective member (of Parliament that is) would win by a landslide. No one took very much notice of Ann Brown-Sloane until the summer of 1957 when in the space of a few months she blossomed into a new persona and was crowned undisputed Prefab Beauty Queen Of The Year. Since then her radiant fragrance has fuelled countless fantasies in the inner recesses of pre-fabricated nooks and crannies. Fortunately Ann Brown-Sloane remains quite unaware of the dramatic shift that has taken place in how the world perceives her. She knows absolutely nothing of the guffaws of crass laughter that sometime erupt in our religious studies lessons. (Whenever the class stumbles across the famous line in the Bible about not "coveting your neighbour's donkey" 'Tubby' Lard always calls out: "But sir, my copy of Exodus says 'You should not covet your neighbour's ass").
Ann Brown-Sloane might live in a six hundred or so square foot prefab like the rest of us, but hers is the only one which is permanently bathed in an aura of sultry, sweltering, glitzy, pulse-racing, heart-thumping Californian-style glamour. Ann has been a regular attender of the Prefab Philosophy Club's seminars. The only one she arrived late for was on Arthur Schopenhauer, and one of his quotations had been chalked up on the board. (Sexual desire was the theme: "It is so very much the chief thing that no other pleasures make up for the deprivation of its satisfaction.") Everyone's face stayed a bright red for the entire duration of the seminar, and Ann felt driven to remark that it "had been the oddest philosophy meeting she had been to so far."
Imagine the amazement which hit us one evening (twilight was falling and our football match on Woodhedge Road had been called to a halt) when we spotted Phil (now nicknamed 'Dark Horse') Perkins silhouetted in Ann Brown-Sloane's bedroom window! Phil had been a moral example to the youth of the estate and a mainstay of the Saint Michael Is No Angel Sunday School. At least he had been until his crisis of faith. This crisis had been gestating for some time. Phil became convinced that some of the core doctrines of Christianity were metaphors rather than literal truths. He told the vicar's assistant that the Virgin Birth was "a metaphor designed to hide embarrassment over sex" and that the Resurrection was "a metaphor to mask our fear of death." As it turned out, however, it was neither of these vital doctrinal issues that finally led Phil to severing his Sunday School links. It was the trauma of The Shock which did this.
An ever-dutiful son Phil had thrown himself into a frenetic burst of housework activity when his parents were away on a day trip to Weston-on-the-Mud. All was going well until he had a sudden impulse to go into uncharted waters and tidy up - not just his own bedroom drawers - but his parents' drawers as well. this was where Phil discovered a mysterious package tightly wrapped up in yellowing musty pages of the local evening paper. (How many dark secrets have been concealed in yellowing musty pages of the Bath & Wilts Chronicle and Herald!) There was no way Phil could resist taking a fleeting peek at its inner contents. They might, after all, include the eleven subbuteo table football players he had been assured might come his way on his forthcoming birthday! No wonder Phil ('Dark Horse') Perkins' hands were trembling when the last wrapper of paper was removed.
A critical juncture in the strange journey that took Phil Perkins from being a morally upright stalwart of the Saint Michael Is No Angel Sunday School into a silhouetted form framed in Miss Ann Brown-Sloane's stylish back bedroom was the chalked-over kerbstone situated three yards behind Miss Ann Brown-Sloane's bushy back garden. This was where Ann stumbled across Phil's sobbing spread-eagled form and saw that one of his long shuddering legs was within a whisker of being hit by the silver-hubs of the wheels of the frenetically driven Co-operative Mobile Shop Van ("share number 24419!") which was due, at any moment, to career its jerky jolting way around the corner of Newtin Road.
What else could someone like Miss Ann Brown-Sloane do but offer the distraught Phil (soon to be 'Dark Horse') Perkins a helping hand, take him under her fragrant solace-bestowing wing, and invite him into prefab number forty-eight to regain her composure by listening to the episode of Hancock's Half Hour that was about to be broadcast on the Light Programme. "To think that the pair of them have been carrying on like that!" said Phil as his tear-drenched face tumbled - "like a leaf from a tree" as he would later say (quoting the poet W.B.Yeats) - into Ann's lap. "And carrying on like that in the sanctity of our prefab home!" "Crikey!" said Ann - and "Crikey!" again - when the true gravity of what Phil had found in the carefully wrapped parcel in his parents' bottom drawer finally began to sink in.

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

The Shock that had been so artfully concealed inside the yellowing bundle of Bath & Wilts Chronicle and Herald newspapers with their tales of ruby anniversaries and prize vegetables went off like a grenade in a greenhouse. Phil Perkin's illusions about the mechanics of species reproduction were sent splintering into the cosmos. It was not so long ago that he had severely reprimanded Roland Bollard for the graffiti the resident of prefab number four had painted up on his prefab roof. (It said, in garish green and gold paint, "Every kid on this estate should be viewed as the symbolic representation of a thousand encounters of a highly sensual kind!") Now the stark truth of this message had been confirmed in all its visceral intensity. Hidden away in the shadowy interstices of a hitherto sedate drawer in Phil's hitherto sedate prefab was no pristine set of clean cut stiff upper lip Subbuteo table football players. There was a pristine set of five packets of contraceptives - plus the remains of a sixth from which the contents had been hurriedly removed. "In the end the truth always forces itself up towards the light!" said a plaintiff Phil as he gazed into Ann's deep azure eyes.
Hardly a day goes by now without Phil ('Dark Horse') Perkins either popping into Ann's place for some comforting moments of consolation or sitting down on the kerbstone outside her sweetly scented garden and idling away the hours by staring into a small plastic gadget which shows, with each click of the button, a new picture of women's breasts. Such are the depths to which some of the more vulnerable young residents of our prefab estate have been known to sink.

You can always tell when election day is approaching in Twiverton. The front of the Swileys' prefab will be plastered with 'Vote Labour!' posters. At the last general election of 1959 the Swileys even had a 'Vote Labour!' poster nailed up on their coalhouse door and another one glued to their water-butt. How many they had pasted up in the sitting room and on the front of their parrot's cage is anyone's guess.
There have been four general elections since we first moved into the prefabs, and the Conservative Party has won three of them - the last three on the trot. "Which is one in the eye for the Trots!" says Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic with a mischievous wink. (Someone should tell the newly arrived resident of prefab number three that his mischievous winks are being completely wasted. No one else on the prefab estate has even heard of Leon Trotsky).
Twiverton is a reddish hued Labour enclave on the western industrial side of Tory Bath. It has been solid Labour Party territory for years, although the odds on it staying this way are shortening by the day. The 'Vote Labour!' posters that periodically blaze out of the Swileys' prefab act like political acid in dissolving old affiliations and loyalties and reconfiguring others. Their twin effect is to give Labour voting a bad name and encourage passers-by to take a more sympathetic look at the qualities of the other parties' candidates. At the last local elections these wee the formidable Mr Edgar Pearce (resident of Camelot Green, President of the Bath Dickens Society and Liberal Party candidate), Edna Browning - soon-to-be-knighted expert on trade union affairs who has moved here from her council house in Tottenham (the ConservativeParty candidate), and Gilbert Youth (the World Government candidate who - win or lose - will continue to hold mild and bitter constituency surgeries in his base in the My Full Moon public house).
A thumb-nail sketch of Twiverton published in The Worker's Voice on the eve of the General Strike of 1926 described it as "a linchpin of the 'proletarian red belt' of north-east Somerset, a hard-edged terrain despite its soft water which includes coal mines, a wool mill, a major crane manufacturing company, and the terraced house retreats of stone masons, cabinet makers and oppressed solicitors' clerks." Romantics on the political left have long regarded Twiverton as almost mythic territory in which echoes from a distant Chartist, Luddite and Leveller past (and perhaps a Muggletonian one as well) can still be heard today. It is only after they come here on a visit and see the Swileys' prefab with its startling array of 'Vote Labour!' posters that they are liable to succumb to dark thoughts about socialist ideas being hopelessly enmeshed with quasi-messianic and utopian fantasies.
It would be pushing it too far to say that the crucial factor behind the Conservative Party's electoral success in 1951, 1955 and 1959 has been the Swileys. That said every council estate in the country is likely to have its Swileys. Die-hard Labour voters have been known to walk by the Swileys' prefab at number twenty-five, stare in disbelief at the forest of 'Vote Labour!' posters and the chaos in the front garden, and arrive at the polling station muttering "Any party but Labour!" No wonder Ray 'Short-Back-And-Sides' - Twiverton's indefatigable Labour Party candidate - has expressly forbidden anyone in his campaign team from giving the Swileys a 'Vote Labour!' poster. This has proved to be of no avail as Conservative Central Office keeps a special watch on the Swileys' prefab. If there are less than two posters on display a phone call is made to Labour Party HQ to demand that a fresh batch of 'VoteLabour!' posyers be swiftly dispatched to the Swileys' address.
Howarth Potter (the recently appointed pipe-smoking agent of the Twiverton Constituency Labour Party and author of 'Must Labour Go On Losing?' argues that the Swileys symbolise "the central strategic dilemma" facing the party's future. His starting point is Ernest Bevin's comment that the British working-class suffers from a "poverty of aspirations." This, he insists, is no longer the case. Since the late nineteen fifties the country has become choc-a-bloc with three-piece suites, Formica tables, record players, Do-It-Yourself stores, and television aerials. There is even some talk of people going on holiday in Spain. While rationing ended in 1954 Howarth Potter believes that a "rationing of the mind" continues to shape Labour Party thinking and philosophy. On his very first visit to our prefab estate the new party agent was introduced to members of the slick salesman's family who live in immaculate prefab number forty-six on the corner of Woodhedge Road. Not only do they have a television set, a Ford popular motor car, and a son at the grammar school -they have a telephone as well! Asked whether they would be supporting Labour in the forthcoming local elections the slick salesman replied - somewhat ominously - "It all depends." Then he added in a hushed voice: "Keep this to yourself, but we are floating voters."
Meeting the slick salesman's family was to have a potent impact on Twiverton's new Labour Party agent. The following year he convened a special meeting of the North-East Somerset Labour Party and urged members to "leave their 'rationing mind-set' behind and appeal to the upward thrusting, spic and span, ultra-ambitious and aspiring section of the new working-class. To voters who will float towards us if we have an attractive party image. To voters like the slick salesman who lives in prefab number forty-six."
A shocked silence followed and Councillor Short-Back-And-Sides', leader of Twiverton's Labour group, rose to speak. "What the party agent has said is all very well. But I cannot see how his spic and span/upward thrusting/aspiring strategy is going to appeal to our core supporters."
A shout then went up from the back of the hall. "Councillor 'Short-Back-And-Sides' has hit the nail on the head. Where will the new spic and span/upwardly thrusting/aspiring strategy leave the people who voted for us come rain or shine? And where on earth will it leave the Swileys!"

It was after an unusually long pub lunch in the winter of 1956 that the editor of the Bath & Wilting Chronicle decided - almost on a whim - to abandon the paper's popular weekly feature on 'Stars of Stage And Screen Who Have Visited Our City' and have a 'Metaphysics Today' column instead. Exactly why he did so is one of those mysteries of the nineteen fifties which it seems impossible to explain. The fact that the column proved to be a great success - a year later it was being syndicated to metropolitan publications across the globe - seems even more baffling.
Without 'Metaphysics Today' the editor's famous line that "those who under-estimate the intellectual hunger of the Bath masses are treading a doom-laden path!"would never have found its way into the Cambridge Book of Quotations or had the impact it did on the cultural climate of the time. And the residents of our prefab estate might never have spent hours leaning over their garden fences and exchanging thoughts on a German philosopher called Walter Benjamin (1892-1940).
Although making "maps of one's own life" was not the first Benjaminesque theme to be highlighted in 'Metaphysics Today' it struck a special chord with the paper's readership. (The first Benjaminesque theme the column had mentioned was the idea of 'aura' - the distinctive atmosphere that surrounds a particular object. It made us realize that our prefabs were almost alone in contemporary mass society in being saturated with a unique 'aura'). 'Spinoza Dice' the pseudonym of the team of journalists given the daunting task of writing the 'Metaphysics Today' column - suggested that Bath & Wilting readers take a cue from Walter Benjamin and "have a go!" at making maps of their own lives.
(The "have a go!" phrase was of course inspired by Wilfred Pickles, the folksy chap from Yorkshire who was host in the highly successful "Have a go, Joe!" BBC radio quiz which was first broadcast in 1946 and inexplicably taken off air in 1967).
The Bath & Wilting promised that the five most intriguing 'life maps' compiled by readers would be published - along with photographs of themselves and their favourite pet - in a special souvenir 'Metaphysics Today' supplement. In Twiverton's two prefab estates the idea of drafting out 'life maps' took off like wildfire. Although the ones drawn up in the Redland Park prefabs have long since vanished into the Sargasso Sea of sitting-room drawers, a 'life map' made by residents of Newtin and Woodhedge Road (which, oddly enough, never made it into the Bath & Wilting's special supplement) has recently been discovered in the back room of the My Full Moon public house. Before we take a nostalgia-drenched look at it, here is Walter Benjamin's original effort at sketching out his own 'life-map'.

"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."

That was Walter Benjamin's pre-war 'Berlin'.

Here is our post-war 'Twiverton'.

"We have evolved a system of signs, and on the green background of such maps (laid out on the baize of a subbuteo table football pitch) they make a colourful show. We have clearly marked in the prefabs of our friends and girl friends and key gathering places of Twiverton youth. These include the 'jug and bottle' entrance to the 'My Full Moon' public house, the fish and chip shop run by Mr and Mrs Tobin, the open bedroom window of prefab number thirteen through which - on one unforgetable occasion - a young lady dressed only in her swimming costume gave us a friendly wave, the kerbstone on the corner of Woodhedge Road on which we sat and pondered our futures, the tree branch benches in Pennyquick Wood, the not-over-prestigious cafe hut in the football ground, the playing field on top of the old coalmine which would have made a grand site for tennis courts, the secret pathways to the Gothic turrets of Brunel's railway tunnel in Silk-Farr wood, and the greens emblazoned with daisies and buttercups on which the dazzling prowess of our sporting skills was displayed evening after evening to an awestruck world.

The football results wireless rota lasted for almost two years. We would turn up at a designated
prefab, fill our glasses with orange squash (being back those innocent pre-cider days!), prepare a stack of pieces of toast and marmalade, and wait for the results to come on at five o'clock.
All of us were active members of the Prefab Philosophy Club. We soon noticed that the deliberations we were having over language, truth and logic began to spill over into our football discussions. People started asking questions like "Why should someone who supports Bristol Rovers have a claim to moral superiority over someone who supports Bristol City?") The brief encounters with the likes of Plato, Kant and Spinoza made us realise how perilously close we had come to getting over-obsessed -maybe even fixated - with sport. After all, kicking a ball around and/or watching other people kicking a ball around is just one small slice of life. Say this to some people and they look at you as if you have lost all control over your senses! But after the first ten fixtures of the 1958-59 football season had been played we found ourselves viewing the game in a completely new light. A mellow sensibility began to permeate our five o'clock football results listening experience.
Having a Philosophy Club in the prefabs created quite a stir. If it had been set up a few hundred yards further up the road in one of the plush council houses occupied by civil servants from the Admiralty no one would have noticed. It would have had a "dog bites man!" level of news interest. Socrates seminars in the prefabs, in contrast, created quite a stir. A few weeks after the Prefab Philosophy Club came into being the Bath & Wilting Chronicle was reporting that the number of people asking to be re-housed further away from the prefabs had fallen while the number who wanted to move into the prefabs had increased! Members of the Stanton-Bullingdon-Smith family who live in an Admiralty civil service house in Camelot Green (it is the one which has a terrapin - a freshwater turtle - in the back garden) doubled up with laughter when they heard the Philosophy Club news. It was only after they overheard the Pearce and Chapman sisters saying how impressed they had been with our Aristotle seminar that the turtle-like smirks began to vanish from their faces.
A quarter of an hour before the football results were broadcast there would be an impromptu quiz. We divided into two teams - the Newtin Road prefabs against the Woodhedge Road prefabs - and the utterly impartial Diane Pearce would be in the chair. She insisted from the start that no questions on either football or philosophy would be allowed. Quiz questions were
never easy, but one of the toughest ones was this one: "Which language was spoken in seventh century Edinburgh?" It was 'Tubby' Lard's hard luck to have to answer it (although if he had bothered to turn up at the Philosophy Club's Aristotle seminar he would have known that the Welsh-speaking Goddodin tribe had been living in Edinburgh at this time). Even though every single one of his favourite football clubs won by a margin of at least three goals 'Tubby' stayed in a sulky mood for the rest of the evening.
In the early days of the wireless rota there would be complete silence while the results from the Football League's first division, second division, and third division 'north' and 'south' were being broadcast. This iron-willed restraint ended as soon as the Scottish scores came in and a
club with a name like Falkirk hit the airwaves. Everyone would start yapping away. Some people would try and calm their nerves by going into the kitchen and refilling their glasses of orange squash, others would head for the bathroom and make all kinds of off-putting noises. There was one notorious occasion when 'Tubby' Lard started shouting out "Who the heck are Stenhousemuir!" and did an imitation Scottish jig around the sitting-room. What an insult this was to the valiant club which had won the Scottish Qualifying Cup in 1902!
Perhaps the dismal level of football maturity which existed on our prefab estate in the 'pre-Cannonball' days is not all that surprising when you remember that the nearest any of our group had ever been to Scotland was Wolverhampton. Scotland, like the past, felt like a foreign country. So who could have guessed that in the hey-day of the wireless rota it would be the results from the Scottish League that would be the fulcrum, the climax, the grand finale of the entire Saturday afternoon results listening experience! Gary Bollard - the dark horse who went on to become a future Vice-President of the Prefab History Society - put it this way in an interview he gave to the sports editor of the Bath & Wilting Chronicle and Herald: "Just as the results of wars fought in Scotland have often made or broken the British state, so the results of football matches in Scotland can make or break the morale of the football cognoscenti of this prefab (e)State."
During the dark pre-'Cannonball' days the evocative allure of Scottish football club names was something which completely passed us by. Leave out the Shakespearean Hotspurs of Tottenham and you are hard-pressedto find any English clubs which come anywhere near to rivalling the resonance of Hibernian or Hamilton Academicals. The Football League likes noting better than a prosaic sounding encounter between the likes of Southend and Preston North End. When a new club was set up in a northern steel-making city the founding committee was so stumped for a club name that all it managed to come up with was the day of the week when the matches were to be played. "At least it was a Wednesday and not a Monday!" says 'Tubby' Lard. Up in Scotland you will not find any Aberdeen Thursdays or Dundee Tuesdays. Instead of the engine-clanging sound of a Northampton Town playing Southampton Town you will hear a Partick Thistle brushing against the Heart of Midlothian!
The moment the 'Cannonball' era dawned in Twiverton there was a headlong rush to choose a club from Scotland to follow. If Diane Pearce, the quiz chairman, had not calmed everyone down it would have been like a scene from a horror movie. Most of the new devotees of Scottish football grabbed hold of one of the big glamour teams based in Glasgow and Edinburgh. 'Tubby' Lard went out of his way to try to make some amends for his earlier conduct by becoming a paid-up member of the Stenhousemuir supporters' club. In prefab number twenty-four we came within a whisker of putting our aluminium-walled weight behind Raith Rovers. The name just rolls off the lips. But we had second thoughts after realising that our affiliation with the Rovers of Bristol meant this would be a Rovers too far. When we finally decided to follow Queen of the South we were accused of jumping on their trophy-laden bandwagon as the club had been top of the second division in 1951. In fact it was the club's name which clinched our decision. This was as close as we were ever going to get to the Queen of Sheba F.C.
After the 'Cannonball' hit the prefabs there would not be so much as a murmur, let alone a noise-filled visit to the bathroom, when the results from the Scottish League were broadcast. The 'Cannonball' came like a meteorite out of the northern night sky. You could see why the Prefab Philosophy Club was soon organizing special conferences on the extraordinary role that chance can play in life. It is only when you take a retrospective look at the past that there seems to have been anything 'inevitable' or 'pre-determined' about this football genius turning up at Twerton Park and prompting us all to think again about the results from the Scottish League.
The odds against Charlie 'Cannonball' Fleming signing up for a non-league outfit like Bath City were formidable. This fellow, after all, had been a Scottish international! And if the former East Fife and Sunderland player had not put on one of our local club's black and white striped shirts then none of us would have given a second thought to the Scottish League. What an ambassador for his country this fellow was! Who else would ever score fifty goals a season for Bath City! No wonder we all went quiet when the Scottish League results were broadcast. The distant land in the north might be filled with other 'Cannonballs' as well! The football novices on our prefab estate had never seen the likes of Charlie 'Cannonball' Fleming before, and they knew for sure they would never see his like again.

Those who drank ginger beer on the stairs of public houses in nineteen fifties' Bath would sometimes hear the disjointed slivers of jokes echoing up from the saloon bar. They would often open with the frisson-loaded words "There was an Englishman, a Welshman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman." During the telling of this joke there always seemed to be an Englishman, a Welshman, and an Irishman present. But none of them ever appeared to take offence.
'Cracking Jokes in Public Houses' was the title of a celebrated article penned by Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic (resident of prefab number three) in the Twiverton Literary Supplement (TLS) in April 1955. The article began by disputing the claim that April is "the cruellest month." It then declared that every philosophically-inclined pub goer should always keep a copy of Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life in a handbag or back pocket. The article ends by inviting readers to mull over the significance of the following quotation that appears on page 161 of the 1938 Pelican edition of Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud's path-breaking book.

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

In the "There was an Englishman, a Welshman..." joke it seems clear that the "concealed problem" is the national one. Drinkers who meet up in Bath public houses are not just saviours of the brewery industry. They are also citizens of a multi-national state. Tensions between its different national groups have sometimes taken on a lethal form. In the post-war calm of the nineteen fifties this "concealed problem" seemed to be at long last a manageable one. This meant it coud be joked about. That, at least, was how it seemed when viewed from the bucolic vantage point of the Cheddar Cheese Straws and ginger beer laden stairs.
An odd thing about the old man's drinking circles (and what odd characters they were) was that they included Englishmen, Welshmen, and Irishmen, but never any Scotsmen. Given the epic nature of the journey from Glasgow to Somerset this was not so surprising. A train ride and an overnight ferry would take you to Dublin by the next day. A train ride and a bus journey would take you to the South Wales valleys in a couple of hours.
So what would happen if a kilt-wearing Scotsman had been present in the saloon bar when the "There was an Englishman, a Welshman..." joke was being told? Would the "concealed problem" of the national question have suddenly reared its ugly head? This is what you wondered as you flicked through the pages of the TLS and sat on the public house stairs.

When I told 'Tubby' Lard that the old man had attended the same elementary school as Roy Jenkins (a political high-flier who went on to become Home Secretary) he did not seem to be too impressed. "Big deal!" said 'Tubby'. "Wittgenstein attended the same school in Linz as Hitler, and I attended the same school as you. When you weigh these crossing of life-paths in the balance of eternity, they do not really amount to a can of beans." I could see I had touched a raw nerve with 'Tubby'. "So which Home Secretary did your old man go to school with!"
The life-paths of the old man and Roy Jenkins did not just come near to crossing at Pentwyn Elementary School. They came near to crossing at Oxford as well. At the same time as Roy was carrying books from one end of the university's Bodleian Library to another, a few miles away the old man was carrying nuts and bolts from one end of the Cowley car factory to another.
(By the way here in Twiverton the term "old man" is used as a term of approbation - not disrespect - for one's father).
Roy Jenkins' old man (like the old man's old man) had been coal miners in South Wales. When they were underground they would lift their hands to the roof of the tunnel and imagine they could touch the flowers and grass on the hillside above. The old man's old man had made the timber supports that kept the roof of the coal seam from falling in. Roy Jenkins' old man had made a brief bid for freedom by heading off to the left bank of Paris. When his money ran out he returned to the coal mines and eventually became a union official. He was briefly imprisoned during the 1926 General Strike and ended up being elected a Member of Parliament. Soon the Jenkins family could afford to employ a maid, and Roy was sent off to the elementary school in a silk suit. This was a big mistake as the other boys threw mud at him.
Pontypool public houses were a no-go area for the young Roy Jenkins. On Sundays his family would drive to a market town and have lunch in a smart hotel. This must have been where Roy acquired his liking for claret and the more sensual side of life.
In Twiverton in the nineteen fifties the old man would take me on early afternoon visits to his favourite public houses. I would be sat down on the stairs, have regular supplies of ginger beer, Cheddar Cheese Straws, and - on special days - pickled eggs ferried up to my regal throne. Here in the bosom of the more genteel section of the British working-class you knew you were one of
history's most privileged guests. Roy Jenkins missed out on ginger beer on the stairs of public houses, but the stage of public life provided him with plenty of consolation.

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

The television age had aerial-ed its way into the nooks and crannies of Prefab Land by 1958. Yet there were certain times of the week when the wireless continued to have a kind of after-life. For example at five o'clock on wintry Saturday afternoons we would tune in to hear the latest market intelligence on our stocks and shares.
A day would come when - even in somewhat down-at-heel places like our beloved Twiverton - when the masses would keep a watchful eye on their stock market investments, purchase 'you cannot lose' shares in privatised public utilities, and make financial 'killings' by buying their council houses at bargain basement prices. But in the nineteen fifties all this was still a long way off. Our investments were in 'football bonds', and hours were spent monitoring the emotional dividends that came from the ups and downs of our football teams.
No one was more scathing of our interest in football than Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic, the semi-bohemian resident of prefab number three. For him football was ideal manure to ensure that the capitalist jungle kept on flourishing. It was both "opium of the masses" (escapist fantasy) and "opiate of the masses" (dulling the pain of mundane lives). Without this futile dissipation of creative psychic energy Dai was certain that the classic late nineteenth century Marxist paradigm would be vindicated with the working-class at long last becoming fully conscious of its alienated and exploited lot.
It has to be said that there were some days when the only thing that Dai himself was "fully conscious" of was the cider flagon that he firmly gripped in his right hand. This was when we would hear him shouting out lines of verse from - of all people - Cyril Connolly - especially the crude reactionary verse about "classes and masses and masses of asses". Perhaps deep down Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic could not really decide whether capitalism was a system of inequality and injustice which should be thrown on the scrapheap of history, or a unique social order which - almost inadvertently - had delivered unheard of freedom and liberty to the common people. If a day ever dawned when the Left was able to realise its dreams you could count on Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic being the new social order's first dissident.
The process of deciding which football clubs to include in your Saturday five o'clock stocks and shares portfolio involves all kinds of complex calculations. Local loyalties, chance encounters
and even aesthetic preferences all play a part. For example: who could anyone resist the appeal of the blue and white quartered shirts worn by Bristol Rovers! (Answer: millions of thoughful and discerning football fans). In terms of moral education what matters is that once you have made your choice of a football club to follow you stick to it through thick and thin.
Of course there are always one or two characters around who fall at the first ethical fence. Take the case of 'Tubby' Lard. He started off as a Bristol Rovers supporter, switched to Bristol City after Rovers lost in the clash between the two clubs, and then - in the twinkle of any eye - was seen draping himself with a Bristol Rovers' scarf after they beat Manchester United 4 - 0 in the FA Cup! When challenged on being a turncoat 'Tubby' had the gall to quote Winston Churchill's retort of 1900. (Churchill deserted the Conservative Party for the Liberal Party, returned to the Conservative Party a few years later, and said: "To rat is one thing, but to re-rat is something special." )
Twiverton's local football hero is Skirton Taverner. He started his career playing with the Whiteway Canaries - the Somerset League Youth Champions. (Then he went on to play for Hereford United and hit the big time with Arsenal. The Arsenal team of the nineteen thirties had a special mystique. It was said they would "head the ball from one player to another, from one end of the pitch to the other, before hammering into the opposing team's net." The only glitch about our prefab becoming one hundred percent Arsenal supporters was the club's defeat in the 1927 F.A. Cup Final by Cardiff City. Our prefab's Welsh affiliations could well have made us Cardiff fans on that day.
Living in Twiverton makes it imperative that we take an anti-glamour antidote to counter the big-headed dangers of succumbing to Big Club Triumphalism. We had to find an obscure Third Division (North) club which seemed quite devoid of a trophy-packed boardroom. This was the logic that propelled us in a north-easterly direction towards following Gateshead football club. This choice was clinched by having a friend from the north who had grown up in Jarrow (a place which is just up the road from Gateshead.)
Jarrow was known as "the town that died" during the nineteen thirties' depression. Our friend from Jarrow was married to 'Auntie' Ivy's brother. ('Auntie' Ivy shared a house with my parents after they moved from bomb-blitzed Bristol to soon-to-be-blitzed Bath). She always looked thin and pale. You knew without anything being said that something had gone badly wrong with her home town. So when the wireless football results were switched on we would all be rooting for Gateshead, for Arsenal, for Rovers, and (though rarely mentioned) Bath City.

Although the Labour Party polled a record number of votes in the general election of 1951, it was the Conservatives who were elected to office. Harold Macmillan became the new Minister of Housing and was determined to out-build his Labour predecessors. And out-build them he did! Three years later - in 1954 - no less than three hundred and fifty-four thousand new houses were constructed. Conservatism with a 'one nation' moustached human face had arrived. The old man said in typically matter of fact fashion that anyone who had read Macmillan's book The Middle Way book (published in 1938) could have seen it coming
No one had told Major Lansdowne about The Middle Way. Otherwise this sad-eyed military man might not have spent every Saturday morning for the next fifteen years trying to sell copies of the Daily Worker in Bath city centre. It would have been hard work just giving them away. Despite the verve and gusto of the paper's headlines -Rigor Mortis's Breakaway Union Defies Call For General Strike! -was a special favourite - the masses remained unmoved. Perhaps selling the paper outside the Government offices where ration books had been issued was a tactical mistake. It was Consumerism, not socialism, which chimed with the mood of the times. When a left libertarian agit-prop newsletter called Neither Moscow or Washington but Twiverton! folded after its second issue the President of the Bath Trades Council was quoted as saying "he was not really surprised." The agit-prop editor's bitter parting shot (he went on to make a successful career in advertising) was "The spirit of the age is against us."
The spirit of the age was also moving against the prefabs. People wanted to move to Middle Way and live in a smart brick-built houses with a garage. Fickle times were weighing prefab estates in the balance and finding them wanting.

"Putting on the agony" sang Lonnie Donegan in 1957, "Putting on the style. That is what the young folk are doing all the while." It was not just the young folk -they were all doing it. The
new buses that zoomed their way from Twiverton into Bath were putting on the style as well. Their engines hummed with all the smooth authority of Daimler cars. Most stylish of all were the Nymph Venuses in blue jeans who emerged out of their make-up parlours to try out the unexpectedly sensual feel of the bus company's shiny soft-padded squelching seats. 'Tubby' Lard was in such a hurry to show the said Nymph Venuses in blue jeans that he was the quickest off the draw with the (never seen before) finger-touch bells that his finger prematurely ejected. This brought the ultra-streamlined 5 A bus to a shuddering brake-screeching halt.
"I don't want (cough) to get off the bus (cough) quite yet! (cough)" 'Tubby's' faint voice called out to the driver. Such was the seething ferocity of the bus driver's returned glance that every bus passenger knew this heinous finger-touching folly would never be repeated again. When the radiant blue jeaned Nymph Venuses stepped off the the bus at the "Water is best!" fountain stop in the city centre, everyone of them glanced admiringly up at 'Tubby'. However 'Tubby' - still down-cast at the fierce reprimand he had received from the driver - was quite unaware of the unique finger-touching status he had just won.
The juggernaught of history was revving up its damned inferno engine once again. The prefabs were acquiring a lacklustre look. Some of their edges had become yellowed with rust, the water butts were sprouting leaks and even the corrugated coalhouses had lost their honey-hued aura. Early mornings found the estate's lawns and hedges covered with a dew of restlessness.
Rumours went around that sharp-eyed operators in grey raincoats had been spotted jotting down estimates of our pale pads' scrap value in black bound notebooks.

There was no denying that the long boom of post-war consumer capitalism had finally arived. It was evidnt in Formica table tops, three-piece suites, Hoovers, hula-hoops, sonic-booming Meteor Jets, the re-painted Co-operative Society mobile van ("Share number 26644"), and a space age-looking vending machine which dispensed cartons of strawberry flavoured milk.
Although they had been tucking into bars of white chocolate in Switzerland since the nineteen thirties, three decades were to pass before they first arrived in Twiverton. Reg Downhill was one of the first to buy one, and - unbelievably - the delicious white chocholate was not to his liking. The sinking feeling of watching Ref throwing the entire bar into the mud spattered gutter was one of the low points of an entire era. A highpoint was hearing that 'Bully' Brown of Shores Way had been arrested for indecent exposure. Who says there is no relationship between character and fate!
Although none of us realised it at the time the selling of bars of white chocolate in the High Street was the opening skirmish in a bare-knuckled battle for economic surpremacy waged between the village's two newsagents. In a lecture at the Bath Literary and Scientific Institute Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic said these 'Paper Wars' can be seen as a microcosm of the battle between old wealth and new money that was about to change the face of late-twentieth century British capitalism.
It is just as well Dai's lecture was never published. The libel lawyers Cart and Erbuck would have moved in, Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic's reputation would have been torn to shreds and his dreams of having a column in the Twiverton Literary Supplement would have been blown out of the water.

Press the reverse button of your time travel machine (don't tell me they haven't been invented yet!), head back to the year 1953 and take a look at the window ledges at the front of our prefab. You will see they are draped with three Union Jack flags. The most anyone else can muster is two!
The mantelpieces in prefab sitting-rooms are not just chock-a-block with commemorative Coronation plates. They are chock-a-block with commemorative Coronation spoons, commemorative Coronation knives, commemorative Coronation trays, and - a big favourite - commemorative Coronation mugs. "Mugs with mugs!" is the drinking salutation given by members of the Oliver Cromwell Society when they meet up in the Hat and Feather public house on the London Road. (This is their favourite public house as it was originally a Royalist stronghold).
By the end of June 1953 there was hardly a two year old in the kingdom who could not spell 'Coronation' and draw a coronet as well. Captains of industry saw they were on to a winner when they re-branded their mints, sofas, lollies, and evaporated milk as Coronation mints, Coronation sofas, Coronation lollies, and Coronation evaporated milk. It was all getting out of hand. Even Twiverton barbers started saying "any Coronations for the week-end sir?"
The mood was already heady in the prefabs when - in May 1953 - local subbuteo table footballers were allowed to go into 'Tubby' Lard's sitting-room and watch the television broadcast of Blackpool's 4-3 victory over Bolton Wanderers. Stanley Mortensen scored a hat-trick. (Who would have guessed that his football career would reach even higher heights when he joined Bath City a few years later!) May 1953 was also the time zone when Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary climbed Mount Everest (with a Bath Bun in their knapsack, or so it was said). A year later in May 1954 a former Bath schoolboy Roger Bannister went where no man had gone before and ran the mile in under four minutes.
The 'Prefabnia Extraordinus years' is how historians refer to the period from May 1953 to May 1954. They were the high point of classical prefab civilization. What is so perplexing is that no pieces of commemorative crockery - not even a single, solitary mug - were ever produced which featured the iconic symbol of the prefab.

Perhaps it is because his own prefab has just five rooms (or six if you include the hall) that 'Tubby' Lard has long been fascinated by the Biblical line "My Father's House has many rooms." ("No", the vicar's assistant told him, "it does not mean the Almighty works in the hotel industry").
While prefabs do not have "many rooms" there are "many rungs" on a prefab estate's status ladder. As the sculpture of Jacob's Ladder on the front of Bath Abbey so vividly demonstrates, there is no escaping from prestige hierarchies irrespective of which side of eternity you are on. Even the angels seem to be pushing and shoving and flapping their ways to the top.
Outsiders always assume that everyone who living on a prefab estate is of roughly the same rough status. But "Au Contraire!" as the slick salesman in the ivy-entwined immaculate corner prefab always says. This is a prefab resident who spends evening after evening mulling over the differences between Jacobins and Jacobites without there being a string vest or a bottle of brown ale in sight! You can imagine how upset he was when a photo-journalist from the 'style section' of the New Yorker turned up and asked if she could take some pictures of the interior of his shanty house slum!
Working out exactly which status rung our own prefab stands on is is a tricky exercise. The old man used to be confident that our ranking will be "rather good" (a favourite phrase). However that was before he returned home from a particularly exacting night in the Golden Fleece and
collided with the front door post. (It will never be the same again). It is possible that our prefab might have slipped down a status rung or two. Of course we take such defeats squarely on the chin. There is always consolation in knowing that the Capability Brown-style light green speckled hedge in the front garden will stay resplendent come rain or shine, and that is enough to keep our spirits up.

The Church of England did not have it all its own way in the religious maelstrom that was mid-twentieth century Twivertonian Protestantism. The Sunday School run by the rival Baptist Church ("Fight truth decay!" has been its catchy slogan since 1902) succeeded in enticing the ture believers of tomorrow with cupboards and cardboard boxes full of reams of coloured drawing paper, crayons, rubbers, and bottles of glue.
"He has gone to the other one!" my mum had to tell the miffed lady recruiter from the Saint Michael Is No Angel after an entire squad from the prefab estate - an entire squad! - defected to the Sunday School ("make your own badges and cakes thrown in as well!") organized by the Methodists. Perhaps never before in the history of institutionalised religion have so many trinkets and baubles been on offer for listening to so few pieces of theology.
Not that Twivertonians are easily taken in. They are, after all, renowned throughout north-east Somerset for judging people "by what they do and not by what they say." (As the revolutionary communist and textiles factory owning capitalist Friedrich Engels so unselfconsciously used to say). What impressed them was not so much the free cigarette cards or the reams of coloured papers dispensed by the Sunday School teachers but the complete absence of leading members of the local Baptist, C of E and Methodist congregations from police charge lists of violent assault, burglary and fraud.
Or as Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic succinctly put it in a TLS special issue on religion: "Were it not for its implication in the Holocaust, Christianity would be in fine shape in the coming battle for
planetary moral supremacy."

The nearest church to our estate is Saint Michael. It is popularly known in the prefabs as Saint Michael Is No Angel. Biblically speaking Saint Michael was not just any old angel by a 'top dog' archangel whose job was to stand up for the people of Israel. (Not too effectively if the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties are anything to go by).
The Sunday School organized at Saint Michael has been a great success, and this is largely the result of two magical ingredients: (1) Sunday School meetings never last very long. (2) They always end with an unexpected treat. The hallowed tradition is to draw Sunday School to a close
with the solemn and much appreciated ceremony of the peace-loving vicar's assistant handing out cigarette cards displaying (for the girls) glamorous Hollywood movie stars standing on top of
tanks and fighter planes and other gruesome instruments of war, and (for the boys) cigarette cards which simply display tanks and fighter planes and other gruesome instruments of war. ("Any means necessary to win over young Christian soldiers!" are the vicar's assistant's cheery words.)
A Sunday morning dawned when Reg Downhill was coaxed out of his marathon-long Sunday morning lie-ins in water-bottle andblanket-swaddled prefab number nineteen by rumours of the
generous cigarette card largesse bestowed y the vicar's assistant. From then on he never looked back. After being confirmed into the Church of England there was even talk of the formerly moody/sulk-prone/and teddy boy-inclined Reg being offered a place on the coveted front row pew!
Older residents of Twiverton still recall the time when the coveted front row pew never went unoccupied. Originally reserved for the higher ranks of the gentry the coveted front road pew was fatally undermined by the lethal pincer movement of this once glittering social formation's demise and the rise of mass society in the shape of a burgeoning council house building programme. Within the space of ten years what the Saint Michael Is No Angel Parish News called "this tranquil, well-turned out and Evelyn Waugh-like parish" had been utterly transformed. The coveted front row pew was all but emptied of its traditional sitters and served as an enduring reproach to the less illustrious present. Although Reg Downhill eventually went (there is no other way of putting this) downhill and succumbed to the spiritual charms of cider drinking in Englishcombe village people still recall the time when the same Reg had come within a hair's breadth of being offered a place on the coveted front row pew.
Stroll through the tranquil grounds of this part Saxon/part Norman/part D-I-Y ancient church and you come across two finely sculptured baroque-styled tombs. While the biting west wind has eroded the majority of its engravings and inscriptions, there is one which stubbornly refuses to disappear. It has become the lodestar that guides residents of Twiverton's two prefab estates 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).
Bouquets of flowers are no longer left strewn on the church yard's two baroque-styled tombs. At most you will see the occasional sighting of a solitary rose or daffodil. Follow the twists and turns of the churchyard's winding path at dusk and you might see the phantom-form of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He sits on the grass and re-reads the 'Ever Again' poem he wrote so long ago. It has become a great favourite in Twiverton, and its heart-chiselled words - "landscape of love", "we set forth, two together", "Among flowers. Facing the sky" - seem to whisper their way through the trees.

At long last it has happened! A crack squad from Duck, Bun and Winker (Bath's top media firm) has fitted up an aerial on the rear end of our yellow coalhouse roof. At first there ws no picture - it was completely zilch. All you could see on the screen was a misty blur of spinning dots and dancing shadows. Now and again something reminiscent of one of the Sliley's faces would start poking out its tongue and wriggling its ears. And then, with the crack media squad from Duck, Bun and Winker about to call it a day there was a shout of 'ignition!' and the picture became crystal clear. There on the screen in all her radiant splendour was someone really famous called Lady Isobel Barnett.
The television set fills up a small fragment of the emptiness that my brother's absence has left behind. No one mentions this out loud, although we all can feel it. There is even a guilty feeling about not having had a television when he was around. the advertisements should say something like: "Buy a TV and fill that existentialist void!"
When a television aerial is being hoisted into place you can tell within a few seconds whether it can pick up both the ITV and BBC channels or only a measly one. So in the case of the areial on out yellow coalhouse roof there was absolutely no way the Slileys were going to resist coming out with the inevitable jibe. "What! Only BBC!" one of the Slileys said. Impossible to deny of course. We could hardly say "It is the latest mega aerial from the States - it looks like a clapped out BBC only aerial but in fact can pick up signals from every TV station on the planet!" The leap from being a no television prefab to a one channel television prefab might have been a giant one step for us. But in a consumer society the goalposts keep on moving and unless you can pick up both channels you are not real players in the game.
And there is no point in saying something like "Those ITV advertisements are a Trojan Horse for the acceleration of the move towards the creation of a more acquisitive capitalist culture." (Unless, that is, you have an urge to get your head kicked in).
We are not going to let our one TV channel sweep all before it. When darkness falls you cannot beat holding a cup of hot cocoa and roving around the wireless stations of the world! The other night we stumbled across a talk being given by a brash and super-confident American tycoon. It was about the qualities needed to achieve success in the fast-moving world of business wheeler-dealing. His words penetrated the easy-going languor of our relaxed sitting-room sanctum like a cool icicle of unwelcome realism.
"Your listeners should remember one thing" said the brash and super-confident American tycoon. (There was then a brief pause which you could tell was deliberately designed to heighten the impact of the imminent message. What a salesman this guy was!)

"Everything in this life is based on the intelligent pursuit of self-interest!"

Not in this prefab, buster!

Going up to Dave 'the angler' Protter's place in Downie Combe used to be fun. Football games in the yard, table tennis, sparring with boxing gloves, larking around... Then in the twinkling of an eye everything changed. It changed the moment the Protters got one! In fact whole swathes of the country have been changing the moment people get one! This hunger for getting one is becoming so intense that a time is fast approaching when time itself will have to be re-classified. It will be goodbye to all the old BC and Anno Domini, BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE stuff. The new parameters of time are BTV (Before TeleVision) and ATV (AfterTeleVision). Nothing is going to be the same again. For example in the old BTV days 'outdoors' was where
kids preferred to be. You could knock on someone's front door and be confident that you would be heard. Today knocks on doors are likely to be drowned out by the noise that emanates from the black oblong viewing machine. And it is no use agoing around to the front and banging on the window as the "Caution: Goggle Box Viewers At Work!" curtains will almost certainly be drawn
and the noise will continue unabated.
The ATV triumph of the 'great indoors' is a wondrous sight to behold. From one end of the country to another covens of glazed-eyes addicts are slumped over their television sets in
Shanghai style opium den trance-like states. Break the quarantine on speaking and you will be hissed and shushed back into the obligatory ATV mute mode. When you finally take your leave and bid a fond farewell the addicts' leaden eyelids will barely register the sweet sorrow of your tip-toed departure.
It is not just in salubrious Downie Combe but in down-market Twiverton as well that the big "when are you getting one?" question is winging its all seeing/all watching way around. No one likes being left behind when everyone else is surfing on a Big Wave of cultural-technological change. The dissident idea that a few rebels on Prefab Estate Island could break away from the main and refuse to bow the knee to eye glazed convention was romantic mythology. It was ditched overboard the moment the first prefab on the estate went out and got one.
The slick salesman who lives in the corner prefab got one way back in 1954! 'Tubby' Lard's family was only a month behind. Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic might come out with loads of radical talk but he has had one for yonks. The other week even the Slileys went out and got one! Anyone who is still without one feel like a disenfranchised serf washed up from the Middle Ages. No one talks about wireless programmes anymore. Say "did you hear?" rather than "did you see?" and they will cut you dead. The only exception is The Goons (still going strong since 1950).
The ATV era is not going to go away. The "when are you going to get one?" question is here for keeps. It paces up and down the road outside, pokes its shiny screened-face through the windows, blasts out phoney synthetic pseudo-laughter to the left of us and to the right of us, prods its long silver aerial through our letter-box. It has the dwindling band of wireless only households completely surrounded. It follows the bus they take home. It is on the lips of the milkman everytime he asks to be paid. You might have been able to evade it back in 1955 but
there is no evading it now. Even the birds that circle above the prefab roofs are starting to screech the same question out: "When the heck are you getting one!"

Before heading off to the Lucky Country my brother donated his bike - our prefab's one and only bike! - to the noble charitable cause of Don 'the angler' Protter's two kids who live in a plush council house up in Downie Combe.
In the heroic early post-war years generous acts such as this had been commonplace. The
Protters were themselves a case in point. On coming across a chap whose luck had run out and whose kitchen cupboard was almost bare and Spam-less they used one of their free British Railways travel passes to take him with them on a day trip to Dawlish in glorious Devon. He was even treated to a half pint of stout and a ham and tomato sandwich in The Black Horse public house!
By the late nineteen fifties a spirit of possessive individualism had begun to reach its furtive way into fraternal enclaves of Downie Combe. Today there is even a campaign to have it twinned with Lookafternumberoneville. The donation of our prefab's one and only bike to a council house in one of the sleeker reaches of Downie Combe is being seen as an archaic gesture from a bygone knightly age. Downie Combe is a cultural weather vane of the nation. This is where scores of once modest earth-bound one wage caterpillar households have awoken to find they have brightly-decorated two-wage butterfly wings. They are itching to leave their old earth-bound buddies a long way behind.
Recently Don 'the angler' Protter stopped me in the street and issued a warning against making
charitable contributions to causes which are other than one's own. Then he paused for a moment to brag that he had never been drunk in front of his kids. (In contrast - so the potentially slanderous allegation went - to you know who).
Don 'the angler' Protter's remark was uncannily emblematic of the cultural transformation that was to come.

Joff Morgan's Plan A on leaving school in 1957 was to break into journalism. A friend at school -Dawk 'the print' Goodall - knew someone who worked inside the hallowed offices of the Bath & Wilts Chronicle and Herald and suggested that dropping him a line might open the way up for an
interview.
In the late nineteen fifties prefab residents would sometime use false addresses when applying
for jobs at 'elite' institutions. The favourite was The Red Telephone Box, Royal Crescent. This was closely followed by The Brown Litter Bin, The Circus. (The Ladies' Rest Room, The Pump Room was quickly abandoned). Gary Bollard - buoyed up after his success in a ukulele competition - was the first resident on our estate to boldly 'come out'. After openly admitting he lived at'Prefab Number Four, Woodhedge Road, Twiverton' Gary astonished everyone by
gaining the prestigious post of 'roving arts correspondent' for the up and coming Bath Literary Festival. From that point on Gary would argue that notions of class inequality were essentially phantoms or "walls in the mind": "While East Berliners are imprisoned by the real wall that divides their city, we prefab residents in Twiverton are imprisoned by the imaginary wall that exists inside our own minds."
Even Gary would acknowledge the existence of a few entrenced forces whch were determined to do their best to resist the meritocratic 'open to all the talents' tide that was emerging at this time. Take Kingston King, head of the Queen Square firm of solicitors 'Kingston King, Withering King, and Yet Another Kingston King'. He was overheard by a reporter from the Bath & Wilting Chronicle telling a fellow Rotarian that if he received another letter of application for a junior common law clerk position from someone who lived in a prefab it would be posted back with
"you must be joking!" stamped all over it.
Joff Morgan's Plan B had been to join the merchant navy, but because his four GCE passes did not include maths he had to go back to the drawing board. So he had to fall back on Plan C - accepting whatever could be conjured up out of nowhere by visiting the pockmarked Ministry of Labour building in Avon Street in Bath. (If Plan C failed there was always Plan D - asking around for jobs on 'the building'). Avon Street had been repeatedly plagued by cholera in previous centuries, and some physicians believed that the bacilli could still be active. It was thus seen by the State as being an ideal location for a Ministry of Labour office.
Plan C worked wonders in 1957 and within a fortnight the resident of prefab number twenty-four had secured a 'trainee management' post at the sweaty foot of the Insteadof instep footware chain. Soon he was being overwhelmed with generous tips from previously shoeless
customers in Bath and Devizes. Unfortunately the 'itchy feet syndrome' is especially prevalent in the shoeware sector and - ignoring calls to "dig in your heels" and "toe the line" from fellow prefab residents - he signed for a ten pound passage to Australia. Two years later - after completing a stint in a toilet rolls factory in Sydney - he was on course to becoming a man of the world.

After doing months of back-breaking-sweat-filled-enamel-furnace-bricklaying in foreign climes
the old man returns home and embarks on a few massive kips. Only when he has thrown off the shackles of weariness can the epic onslaught begin. "Sleeping is no mean art: you need to stay awake all day to do it." (F.Nietzsche). Not in our prefab.
The forest of foliage in our back garden keeps on growing away and does not have the slightest inkling of the ferocious rate of digging that is about to overwhelm it. "He is back from the continent!" we say to the neighbours. There is no one else on the prefab estate who spends months away working on the 'continent'. Quips about "Harwich for the continent, Frinton for the incontinent!" and "Fog in the channel, continent isolated!" which have us in stitches in prefab number twenty-four (well they did once) are met with puzzlement elsewhere.
It takes just three days for the old man to have turned the soil over, planted neat-lines of potatoes and cabbages, firmed up the garden paths, removed all the weeds that disfigure their edges, and set a delightful vegetable symmetry in place. With the rear of our place ship-shape and in Bristol fashion the terrain of battle shifts to the less fearsome garden in the front. Our world famous light green speckled hedge is speedily returned to its original pristine condition and the lawn re-turfed. With the prefab's six windows shining in the mid-day sun thoughts turn to requisitioning materials for the indoor painting and decorating campaign that has been pencilled in for fourth day.
By now the neighbours are staring at this prolific work-rate with awestruck admiration. The name of Alexey Stakhanov naturally springs to their lips. Largely forgotten now, this Russian Hero of Socialist Labour mined 227 tons of coal in a single shift in 1937 and was featured on the cover of Time Magazine. No plaudits are going to be bestowed on Twiverton's Jack Morgan. And yet - as any independent observer of the masterly tranformation and aesthetic renewal of the gardens of our prefab will tell you - he is clearly up there in the Alexey Stakhanov super-productive worker aristocracy league.
After the sixth day of labour has been done the old man puts on his American movie Humphrey Bogarte style hat and catches the 5A bus into Bath. His first call will be the plush looking bank in Milsom Street (the one with the elegant ceiling and chandeliers as well) where he will bulge his wallet with a wad of hard-earned ten shilling and one pound notes. Then it will be off for some "Wine of the Gods!" in an old drinking haunt. After an arduous spell of proletarian exile abroad, of aching muscles and mountains of bricks, of days bathed in sweat and cement dust and lonely evenings of lost dreams, days such as these are truly to be savoured. He is both a labourer and a free man again! The old man strides into Smith's Wine Vaults, salutes the landlord, lights up a Dutch cigar, and quietly celebrates his resurrected prefab life.

When the Twiverton Literary Supplement did a profile of George Rotinoff they described him as "the Isambard Kingdom Brunel of prefab engineering." He applied the expertise he had built up from years in shipbuilding to design a de luxe New Model Prefab which is now on show somewhere in the North of England. It has all kinds of jazzy accessories - sinks with double drainers, dry goods cupboards, built-in shelves, drop-flat tables. You name it, the New Model Prefab has it!
The one thing it does not have is spheres. If you want to hear the Platonic music of prefab spheres you will have to cross the Atlantic and get hold of R. Buckminster Fuller. His first spherical prefab house was put on display in a Chicago department store in 1929. Ever since then buffs have been saying "We have seen the pre-fabricated future and it is round!" In 1949 R.Buckminster Fuller unveiled his lightweight aluminium Wichita House. Its geodesic domes took prefab panache to a new level, even though none of George Rotinoff's drop-flat tables were inside.
There is nothing geodesic about our own 'AIROH Aluminium prefab', but at least when you step inside it there are no fears of being bathed in a mysterious green glow and taking off in flying saucer fashion to planet Mars. Art college students spend untold hours debating whether the dominant principle of design should be form or function, beauty or utility. What the 'AIROH' shows is that it is possible to have both! Miss Silk-Farr (who spent a term at the West of England College of Art and enjoys taking midnight strolls around our prefab estate) says that the success of the 'AIROH' design is a ringing endorsement of the "Form must follow function!" philosophy.
When someone first catches sight of our prefabs - with the coalhouses and water butts standing guard like heroic sentinels - they invariably gasp with wonder at the under-stated elegance of it all. Perhaps the rectangular design will surprise all the cutting-edge experts and outlast the upstart Buckminster Fuller spheres after all. They could continue to evoke a sense of the sublime for generations to come. Not that we can be sure. Zhou Enlai - when asked to make an assessment of the French Revolution - replied "It is too early to say."
It is the same with the prefabs.

The origins of prefabs have been traced back to the flimsy contraptions that shepherds carried around on their backs to kip in at night. The solid palaces we live in today were a nineteenth century invention. In 1830 prefab evolution took a quantum leap forward when H.John Manning, a London carpenter, pre-cut pieces of timber for his son who was emigrating to Australia. These were stored on board ship, and then assembled together in the "lucky country" to make the 'Manning Portable Colonial Cottage.'
Sixty years later with the "I can if Yukon!" gold rush another moment of what evolutionists call "punctuated equibrium" took place. Mail order companies started sending prospectors self-assembly prefab packs. These were so effective that prefabs are still all the rage in the Klondike today. In 1908 Sears Roebuck & Co. got in on the 'prefabs by mail order' act, and it continued to be big business for the next thirty-two years.
Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic believes there is some kind of "elective affinity"(how he loves Goethe's well-trodden phrase!) between the American Frontier and the British Prefab Estate. In both places new forms of collective existence were forged,and the similarities do not end there. Doubles of Roy Rodgers, Wyatt Earp, the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy and other stars of the Saturday morning matinee circuit can be seen drifting around our estate on the look out for indigenous native peoples to annihilate. recently they have been joined by teddy boys who refuse to step outside their front doors without carefully adjusting their bootlace ties.
If there is any truth in the claim that architecture is frozen music, then de-frosting a prefab would unleash the pulsating beat of Frankie Lane's Rawhide! Yet prefabs look remarkably like wig-wams, and if you look at our class location then we would be on the same side as the Red Indians!

The prefab estate was a hotbed of debates. As soon as someone said something like "That Plato fellow had a few good ideals" we were off. It was only after our class at Twiverton School was
made to stay behind for an extra hour and chant 'good idea' that we realised a Somerset "good ideal" is called a "good idea" elsewhere. If you want to land a job with the BBC (admittedly this is not a typical career goal of most prefab residents) then mastery of 'Received Standard English' is vital. Going around asking "Received By Whom?" will get you nowhere.
Some days after the Soviet Union sent its Sputnik satellite into space (this would have been in October 1957) a completely new word - prefabnik - rocketed its way into the local lingo. This was not (as many people thought) a theft-implying slur on the character of those who dwell in prefabs. Consult the Dictionary Of Prefab Argot and you will find it simply refers to "someone who has resided in a prefab for a number of years." A prefab (or fabpre as the cider drinkers up in Englishcombe Village call it) is defined as "a slim-line pale-faced low-slung single-storey temporary bungalow with a sprout that was mass produced in the late nineteen forties and has never won the recognition it deserves." In its technical appendix the Dictionary adds that most British prefabs were made of aluminium (with asbestos being thoughtfully added as well), weighed almost a ton, and covered nearly a thousand square feet of floor space. A prefab can be erected in a few days by a gang of men with a crane. "What an erection!" gasped ninety-three year old Mavis Slade when she saw ours go up.
Perhaps it is because they live in plush accommodation with an inside toilet, a refrigerator, an electric cooker, airing cupboards and associated mod.cons. that prefab residents have acquired a
reputation for a shade complacent and self-satisfied. Yet although prefab residents have it all they can occasionally feel gripped by a sense of restlessness and unquenchable ambition. Blaise Pascal's observation - "All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone" - is valid even for prefabniks. This is especially so at spring time. Go to any prefab estate in the country, and you will see people with access to every mod.con.imaginable, and with gardens at the front and the rear as well, who continue to harbour secret yearnings for mythical utopias!
This is not the case on chill winter mornings when an icy wind is lashing the earth's delicate skin. Lounging around in bed and dreaming of golden beaches and palm trees is not an option at this time. The prefab will not warm itself up! Prefabniks must seize hold of the day, move fast, hop down the back steps, unlatch the coal shed door, shovel coal into the grey bucket, zoom back into the sitting room HQ, clean out the grate, remove the ashes, race outside again and dump the ashes on the back garden path, return to the icy HQ, deftly place the fire-wood into its optimum heat-generating formation, crumple up yesterday's newspapers (remembering to keep a few pages in reserve in case the toilet paper runs out), push them into the sides of the grate, strike a match against an un-balded segment of the sanded edge of an England's Glory matchbox, blow puffs of air at the smouldering lumps of coal, and shout "ignition!" in Cape Canaveral style the moment a flickering purple flame leaps forth.
Only then can prefabniks begin to ease up, draw some breath, sweep up the flecks of debris scattered across lino-covered floors, saunter into the kitchen, gather up a slice of crisply burnt toast, brew up some tea, watch the winking flames sparkle in the fireplace, thumb through a few pages of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, work out an hour in the afternoon when there will be time "to stand and stare", and serenely celebrate the onset of a new day.

Young aristocrats in the eighteenth century had a tradition of going on grand tours of Europe's sites of classical civilisation. Young prefab aristocrats of the twentieth century had a tradition of going on grand tours of Europe's enamel furnaces.
In 1957 my brother was taken on a visit to the enamel furnaces of Brussels and Paris. Mr Van de Zee, a generous-minded Derro Company manager (and probably the only generous-minded Derro Company manager) arranged for all their hotel and travel expenses to be paid! We pinned a map of Europe up on the bedroom and marked up the route they would take. In the eighteenth century grand tour travellers sailed from Dover to Calais. Today those heading for the grand enamel furnaces sail from Harwich to the Hook of Holland.
A red line marking the location of the 'Iron Curtain' was drawn on the bedroom wall map in order to add a touch of Cold War suspense. Everyone knew that if you ended up on the wrong side of this red line there was a risk of being dragged out of your bed and shot. (Only a few years later did we learn that this was also happening on 'our' side of the 'Iron Curtain' in General
Franco's Spain.)
Some days before the old man and my brother were due to return home from their grand tour we heard a familiar knock on the front door. There, standing in the front step, stood my brother, the old man, and a third unfamiliar presence - a massive black eye. The old man's freshly-bruised face wore an evasive "wild colonial" look. He announced that "The Grand Tour had gone rather well." Noticing the intensity of our stares at his newly-sculptured facial architecture he added that this was the unfortunate result ("cough! cough!") of a brick falling on his head at the entrance to the Derro Company office in Paris. We bided our time and waited for the beans to be spilled.
Apparently the official officials had struck yet again. The old man was quietly contemplating destiny in a dimly-lit bar when the Paris police - who are yet to be informed of Copper Jones' Queensbury Rules style of crime control - stormed in. As soonas they set eyes on the gallois furnace bricklayer they pounced. The Fourth Republic was on its knees at this time, with army generals who supported the cause of beleaguered settlers in Algeria hatching plans to assassinate the President and launch a military coup. Perhaps the lightening speed with which the old man can down his drinks convinced the official officials that this was one of the coup plotters or assassination agents they were after. The suspected foreign saboteur was taken into custody, and the old man - who never likes his contemplative drinking being disturbed - refrained from going quietly into the dark night. Fortunately trans-national capital can move quickly when one of its its key sources of profit is removed from the point of production, and the Derro Company secured his speedy release.
Although the days of the French Fourth Republic were numbered, the republic of the gallois enamels furnace bricklayer kept the Derro Company going for another two decades.

The old man has always been a shade wary of officials - and that is official! Not just income tax officials, Ministry of Labour officials/national insurance officials/council officials/passport officials/housing department officials/border control officials/rent collection officials/electoral registration officials/and medical officials, but the official officials as well.
Once he arrived in the early hours of a dark and dismal morning at Temple Meads station in Bristol, and found that the connecting train to Twiverton had left without him. As he set off on the ten mile walk home the heavens opened, torrents of rain poured down, and his travel bag with the prized furnace bricklayer's trowel inside became even more weighed down. Pausing for breath he noticed that a police car - an official official's car - was trailing him and tracking his every move. For the next three miles it was driven at a snail's pace, almost nudging sagging water-laden furnace bricklayer's trowel carrying bag. "You could at least offer me a lift!" the old man shouted at the two smirking official officials.
I am yet to see Copper Jones smirking. This is an official official who seems to perform the delicate task of putting the coercive arm of the state into the middle of our prefab estate with tact and some panache. "I am here to ensure that the police protects all sections of society" he says. (You half-expect him to add this caveat: "Although as presently constituted the State's police force tends to serve some sections of society rather more vigorously than others.")
It was not just a rain-drenched ten mile walk home from Temple Meads station that helped shape the old man's distrust of officials. Other layers of memory are also at work. These include tales of police conduct during strikes and lock-outs in the South Wales coalfield and the infamous
Judge Jefferies. Some of the old man's ancestors were Cornish horse traders. When the 1685 Monmouth rebellion failed Judge Jefferies ordered two hundred to be executed. Another eight hundred were transported into slavery in the Caribbean. I have a hunch that a few Cornish horse-traders were amongst them.
In 1688 a group of upper class plotters met up in a grand house in Chesterfield and set about accomplishing what the Duke of Monmouth and his followers had failed to accomplish. The Staurt Monarchy was overthrown and the 'Glorious Revolution' made. As Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic put it in his piece on regime change in the TLS: "what counts is not only what is done and how it is done but who does the done."

Gary Bollard could hardly believe his luck after spotting a mouth-watering "Without obligation!" advertisement in Tit-Bits magazine. Not only was he being offered the chance of purchasing a "magnificent sample of commemorative stamps" at a "bargain basement price" from "the Welsh capital's premier philatelist emporium." He was also being given the option of returning these magnificent stamps "without charge" if not "completely - and we mean completely - satisfied!" For 'Stanley Gibbons' Bollard, philatelic king of the prefabs, such a chance was far too good to miss.
For the next few days Gary was on tenterhooks. He began to have nightmarish visions of the stamps being mistakenly sent not to Twiverton but to the dreaded Tiverton in Devon. Then - quite out of the blue and almost two weeks late - the "magnificent sample of commemorative stamps" finally burst its rapturous way through his letter-box. The rapture did not last: it was a case of philatelist interruptis. It looked as if every size twelve boot in the post-office sorting room had spent the last fortnight jumping up and down on his magnificent sample. If the commemorative stamps had gone twelve rounds in the ring with Jack Dempsey or Rocky Marciano - or even twelve rounds with Jack Dempsey and Rocky Marciano - they would have been in far better shape.
Gary promptly posted the battered package back to the stamp dealer's de luxe Cardiff emporium with the words "GOODS RECEIVED IN DAMAGED CONDITION" written in large capital letters on both its front and back. These finely engraved capital letters were to be of no avail. Before you could mutter "Joseph Stalin" and "rootless stamp-collecting cosmopolitans" a fuming-at-the-mouth letter had catapulted back from the de luxe and emporium in Wales's capital city. "Contact will be made forthwith with the Twiverton police unless a compensatory payment of two pounds and ten shillings is received forthwith! Our sample of stamps appears to have been deliberately trampled underfoot!"
Of course they have! What else do you expect if you send commemorative free samples to prefab estates! The moment any items of value land on one of our door-mats we drag them into the blood-stained coalhouse, put on a pair of mud-splattered hob-nail boots, and start trampling them under foot.
After a consultation with lawyers in the My Full Moon Gary 'Stanley Gibbons' Bollard finally caved in. He bit the bullet and sent off a postal order to the de luxe Cardiff emporium. At least he was able to console himself with having learnt a salutary lesson about the dangers of succumbing to the meretricious blandishments of capitalism. No more glad, confident mornings would be spent idly leafing the inviting pages of Tit-Bits magazine. His new plan for the future was to "keep it tight at the back."
After being told of Gary Bollard's travails the old man recalled some words of wisdom from his youth in South Wales: "Experience is a hard school, but fools will learn at no other."