Viewed from afar prefabs have a solitary grandeur, especially at twilight time when the dogs begin to bark. Not that prefabs are natural loners. Like buffalos they prefer to hang together in herds. This gives a sense of defensive security against a predatory and at times condescending world. Although their sharp-edged pristine form has put them squarely (or rectangularly) in the forefront of architectural innovation, prefabs have a structural flaw, an Achilles' heel, which fresh licks of paint cannot disguise. Their roofs and walls are far too thin-skinned. This leaves them too
hot in the summer and too cold in the winter (as our goldfish, frozen solid in its bowl last December, would tell you if it could).
"Their prefab abode in the Royal Crescent was being re-decorated." Such a sentence could only be found in Mad magazine. No work of English literature has ever made mention of a prefab, and no prefab has ever been given a Royal Crescent address. Great care is taken to ensure that words are finely calibrated to fit in with designated housing status. Officials in the Guildhall who are assigned the delicate task of The Naming Of Names do not dole out any old address to any old Tom, Dick or prefab Harry. Words are finely calibrated with designated housing status. Houses with gravel paths and high hedges are not often to be found in Depot Road. Show me a row of prefabs in Cheyney Mews and I will show you a prefab coalhouse with a gold and diamond studded coat of arms! Print too much money and you devalue the currency. Give one prefab estate a Royal Crescent and they will all want one.
Our own prefabs are in roads which give no hint of pre-fabrication: 'Newtin' and 'Woodhedge' are chirpy, upbeat names. But in Twiverton we are usually referred to as 'The Prefabs'. The slick salesman in the immaculate corner prefab takes this as a complement. "Just as one has 'The British Empire', 'The Royal Navy', 'The Reform Club' and 'The Establishment', so one has The Prefabs'".
A few minutes away from our estate and comouflaged behind a cluster of trees is Meadepool House. This is a residential home for ladies who are unable to speak and unable to hear. Tag along with Ronnie Rogers' mum (she has a cleaning job there) and you will be led into a large room with a high ceiling where all the residents of Meadepool House are sat down in a circle of chairs. Most of them knit away, some just stare up at the high ceiling. Every now and again one of the ladies can stand it no longer and will race outside in a flood of tears. They could do with some new company and different things to do. The Naming Of Names officials in the Guildhall should rename it something like Come In And Cheer Us Up.

The dust of the post-war settlement has all but settled and the fifty households of this prefab estate are preparing to go their separate ways. Frayed rolls of black and white squared lino are being rolled out on the garden paths, mouldy drawers prised out of mouldy drawers, priceless Turner and Rembrandt paintings carefully taken down from walls (just kidding on that one), pliers and pullovers packed into ex-army canvas bags, wheat separated from chaff, metal bath tubs and flat irons lifted on to scrap merchants' wagons. Bathroom ablutions and evacuation procedures reveal that The Big Move is already under way.
One (as yet unknown) prefab is to be saved from annihilation and dispatched to the Great Museum of Architecture on the Isle of Sky. Messrs Oblivion and Void - Museum Memory-Curators-In-Chief - will give their welcoming speeches and assure the assembled guests, all dressed in the fashions of yester-year, that these pale pads bent every aluminium sinew to keep their residents warm and dry. Those standing on the balconies will start a gentle round of applause. Our past will be quitely accepted for what it is and for what it was.
The prefabs' elusive presence will continue to be felt. It will tug away at our thoughts, shadow our footsteps, peer over our shoulders, brush against our coat sleeves on lonely days, leave a scent in the crevices of days, query acts of bad faith, and provide some balm and solace when we
find ourselves adrift in shallower and more evasive times.

There can be no doubt that Demolition Day will be highly charged. No, people will not have to pay any money to watch their prefabs being smashed to pulp. Demolition Day will be charged in the currency of raw tension, see-sawing emotion, and palpitating pathos.
Knocking our prefab estate down will be the biggest event to take place in this neck of the woods since - well, since the day when our prefab estate first went up. When the old crowd gathers around to watch them pummel the steel frames, plaster-board lining, and asbestos cladding into dust hardly a single wrinkled cheek will manage to stay dry. ("And some people will cry as well"). There are rumours that a few ex-prisoners-of-war from Germany and Italy who helped build some prefab estates will be turning up as well.
Do not count on any banner-waving delegations being dispatched to the Guildhall to demand a last minute reprieve. No cheers would go up if a headline proclaiming The Big Move Is Off! was splashed across the front page of the Bath & Wilting Chronicle. Even delaying Demolition Day for a few months would produce a gnashing of teeth and a tearing of cloth. In some parts of the country prefab residents have gone on hunger strike to stop their pads being bulldozed into oblivion. There is no chance of that happening here. Smart new houses with brick walls are waiting to be moved into just a quarter of a mile away. The well-worn skins of nineteen forties'
have no place in a world of chrome-lined milkbars with bumper-sized jukeboxes. The
nostalgicians are in full retreat. The people want the keys of full council house citizenship - and they want them now!

Silk-Farr House has well-kept lawns, delightful flower beds, a lake, a water-fall, a glasshouse filled with tropical plants, a tennis court, and a hermitage. (The paid recluse who once lived there was dismissed after being seen sneaking out of the grounds for an unreclusive pint in the My Full Moon).
The delivery round of Bennie, our "fastest in the west" milkman, includes both the prefab estate and Silk-Farr House. He has heard from Sir Isaac Silk-Farr that before the war children's fetes
were held once and sometimes twice a year in the grounds of Silk-Farr House. When he asked whether the time had come to hold another fete (and perhaps inviting kids from the prefab estate along as well) might be held some day Sir Isaac burst into tears and became quite disconsolate. Benny is sure that getting ordinary Twivertonians and scions of the Somerset gentry socialising and playing croquet together "could be a first tentative nudge towards building the New Jerusalem!"
In its heyday symmetrical geometrical designs of the grounds of Silk-Farr House were widely appauded. Then Lancelot 'Capability' Brown's 'natural' style became all the rage. Today it has acquired a wild romantic 'picturesque' look. No wonder the TLS editor has been losing his patience and was on the point of thundering out an editorial in tabloid style which said: "Farr Silk's Sake, Make Your Mind Up! Your grounds cannot be symmetrical and natural and 'picturesque' all at the same time!"
Well, Sir Isaac Silk-Farr begged to differ, and the TLS and its dingy down-at-heel editorial offices next to the railway arch on the Lower Bristol Road has had to put up with it.
In recent years Silk-Farr House itself has begun to look a shade dingy and down-at-heel. Even in its prime the much trumpeted warm-air heating system never seemed to work in the servants' rooms. Today Miss Silk-Farr's own quarters are said to be "as cold as a prefab kitchen." The gas lighting is failing, and locals talk of an evening is coming in which will light none of Silk-Farr House's lights.
Hanging in pride of place on the first floor stairway at Bath's Victoria Art Gallery is a painting by an artist whose nom de brush is 'The Tristan Tzara of Twiverton'. In the foreground is a honey-walled Italian villa set in well manicured lawns. Behind the villa is a majestic galleon beached up on a debris-filled industrial canal. In the top right corner a fortune teller gazes into a crystal ball engraved with the words "Silk-Farr House."
Len Flanders could hardly believe his good fortune when he was appointed 'Firewood Chopper-Up In Chief' at Silk-Farr House. (One of his ancestors is said to have been 'Guardian of the Stool' in the sixteenth-century King's Court so the post was as good as his.) Len's new career got off to a somewhat choppy start. With his first shift completed he stretched himself out on the lawn, rested his weary head on a log wrapped in purple overalls (how the Somerset gentry love
purple!) and fell into a trance-like sleep. The scent of the giant mushrooms that grow in the turrets of Brunel's railway tunnel must have been carried towards him in the wind. Len fell into a dream of lost time, starlit nights filled with a Harvest moon, jugs of winking mead, and tales of those who had died too young. Hours later with twilight drawing in Miss Silk-Farr stumbled across his sweat-soaked form. It was touch and go whether he would be invited into the firewood shed again.

Is it pure chance that the most raucous prefabs on the estate are the ones that are nearest to the My Full Moon public house? And is it also pure chance that the most serene and genteel ones are those which are snugly ensconced on the high ground bordering Twiverton's finest - Twiverton's only - Italian villa style country house? These are the kind of issues estate residents mull over as they relax on top of yellow corrugated coalhouses on warm sunlit days.
In the Victorian era the splendid 'Silk-Farr House' was a citadel of power and wheeler-dealing. Show insufficient flair at one of the fabled and fabulous Silk-Farr masked balls and the career of
an up-and-coming baronet (Sir Roger Sliley., Bart. is the classic example) would be caught dead in its tracks.
Today this Italian-style villa has just one resident - the fragrant and ever enigmatic Miss Silk-Farr - who endeavours to keep up her family's tradition of public-spirited philanthropic endeavour by paying an annual visit to the junior school (built in 1952 on land adjacent to the estate) in order to donate books and a hunger for glittering prizes.
For near-on four decades the Silk-Farr dynasty formed part of the country's military-industrial complex. Fabrics for the British Army were manufactured in its mills. It is 'no accident' (as the Marxists say) that Perry Dividend (the patrician Irish aristocrat, revolutionary firebrand and editor of the Soho-based Left Review) was a regular visitor to the Silk-Farr archives. In fact his paradigm-shattering thesis of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie fusing together to form a new hegemonic-power bloc was formulated here in Twiverton in Silk-Farr House!
At their plutocratic peak the Silk-Farr dynasty owned a woollen mill, a quarry, a coal mine, a limeworks, and hundreds of acres of prime Somerset farmland. In The Rise and Fall of the Twivertonic Rockefellers (dedicated to the eminent historian Professor R. S. Neale) forensic analysis is made of the murky origins of the Silk-Farr wealth. The widely held view of there being some link with the slave plantation in Antigua fleetingly mentioned in Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park is found wanting. Cumberland in the "sheep ate men" era provided the source of the Silk-Farr capital that "dripped from every pore with blood and gore" (as Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic always delights in saying).
The sub-title of The Rise and Fall of the Twivertonic Rockefellers has left some of its readers perplexed. Why, they ask, has a question mark been added to Balzac's famous line:

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime?"

It seems the question mark was the authors' way of acknowledging the creative entrepreneurial flair and sense of civic responsibility displayed by the Silk-Farrs during their Twiverton years. (The company finally went bankrupt in 1954).
As for the mythology dreamt up by Glastonbury-based pamphleteers that the lineage of the Silk-Farrs can be traced back to Merlin the Wizard, the Recluse of Monkton Combe, King Arthur, and the Head Priest of Stonehenge, this is finally nailed once and for all.

The prefab on our westerly, Bristol side is occupied by a dynamic do-it-your-self action man who moved here from London. Within days of his arrival he had bulldozed his entire back garden away to make space for a garage. "No car yet, but what a garage!" is what the local wags say. Surly, agitated, arrow-edged looks are fired off at anyone who dares to cross his path. They are left in no doubt that he is itching to bulloze them away as well.
The mercurial Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic in prefab number 3 is the yang to action man's ying. The only garages he has bulldozed away are the ones he has created in his imagination. Every prefab estate has at least one budding literary talent (always unrecognised) whose free time is spent staring at corrugated coalhouses and waiting for inspiration. Not that Dai is totally unrecognised anymore. Since his breakthrough in the summer of 1956 Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic the 'Welsh Hegelian' (as he was originally known) has been gathering up chippings from the statue of fame by penning his 'Conjectures' columns in the Twiverton Literary Supplement (or the TLS as it is internationally known).
Strangely enough it was Dai's old bete noir - Idris Pitman, Member of Parliament for Twiverton and North-East Somerset - who helped secure the prefab radical his sinecure on the TLS. "Idris is to myself and the TLS as Lord Beaverbrook was to the Daily Express and Michael Foot!" Dai once said. "And just as AJP Taylor was always on hand to give a few quid to Dylan Thomas, so I know that Idris will always lend a helping hand when I am on the floor!"
People always ask how Dai acquired his 'Tolstoy' middle name. This goes back to the first TLS 'Conjectures' column he wrote. This rambling piece began by pointing out that children from poor families are five times more likely to die in road 'accidents' than those from the middle class. Then it asked whether "we can really talk of anything being an accident?" Finally he
asked readers to chew over Tolstoy's ideas about misery and happiness. According to Tolstoy misery comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but there is something about happiness which makes it always feel the same. This struck a chord with TLS readers, and Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic has been writing his 'Conjectures' column ever since.

"All happy prefabs are alike, but an unhappy prefab is unhappy after its own fashion."

The slick salesman who resides in Woodhedge Road's immaculate corner prefab is in pole position in the race for top prestige position on our estate. This financial colossus does not just have a telephone - he has a Ford Popular car and a television set as well. The only 'triple crown' on the estate! An entire squad of post office engineers had to be dispatched to put a telephone pole up for him! (Which makes it 'pole' position twice over.)
Recently the slick salesman's son won a scholastic 'gold' (a place at the grammar school) after sailing through the eleven plus examination. Currently our estate has secured two 'golds', two 'silvers' (places at the technical school), and six 'bronzes' (places at one of the two secondary modern schools). This Darwinian struggle can be a cruel business with some friendships being broken. Being told you are only worth a 'bronze' (or even a 'silver') when you are eleven year olds is a downer. We all went to the same primary school, so why do the rules change when we go to a secondary school? The response of the slick salesman in the immaculate corner prefab is that "the Swileys would drag standards down and - before you know it - western civilization would hit the rocks." (The Swileys came within three yards of overhearing this. If they had the slick salesman's immaculate corner prefab would have been immaculate no more).
A letter from Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic published in the Bath & Wilting Chronicle claimed that
children from well-off families who failed the eleven plus were able to leap-frog their way into private schools. "The kids from this prefab estate who fail the exam have to grin and bare it and make do with East Hill or Weymouth House!" This provoked a barrage of letters (oddly enough they were all from people called Waugh) which all used the phrase "self-pitying hogwash!" Prefab estates like ours were said to be "awash" with bursaries and generous scholarships to leading public schools. "I know for a fact that the upper-sixth at Winchester is infested with former former prefab-dwellers from Twiverton!" wrote one junior Waugh.
Len Flanders lives in one of the council houses in Shores Way that were built (the residents have yet to be told of this) on top of a disused coal mine. Pinned up on his bedroom wall is the Certificate of Education (CSE) he was awarded at East Hill secondary modern. He calls it "the poor man's consolation prize."
The other day, quite out of the blue, just as we walked by the My Full Moon public house, he hurled a bitter and unwarranted canard at me: "You and that 'Tubby' Lard only mix with grammar and tech school types!" When I mentioned this to Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic he said that
"even mundane fields of social interaction such as your own have been penetrated by the dominant form of ideological discourse!" (I was not quite sure how to take this).
At least you get driving lessons at East Hill Secondary Modern. Those of us drafted into Weymouth House Technical School (1873-1973) have to endure the most creepy woodwork lessons that have ever been invented.

Large sums of treasure were spent by the Mighty State Machine in the nineteen forties in
putting prefabs up. Two decades later large sums of treasure were spent by the Mighty State Machine in knocking prefabs down.
Tudor Walters had a big influence on public housing in Britain. Like Aneurin Bevan he believed it should be of a high quality. Others simply believed it should be high.
Almost every city has some tower blocks. The tenants of the first ones which went up were typically bricklayers, bus drivers, panel beaters, shop assistants and the like. They had low investment costs and were therefore easily replaceable if the towers came crashing down. Followers of Le Corbusier (or Charles-Edouard Jeanneret as we always call him on our estate)
dreamt of lifting prefabs into the sky and bolting them together into a stunning vista of silhouetted hanging baskets.
The idea of lifting bolted together prefab structures into the sky was given a boost by the 1956 Housing Subsidy Act. If a housing block went up four floors the council which built it would be
paid £20 a flat. If it went up another two floors this cash wad was almost doubled. Building firms and architects (most famously in Newcastle) found rich pickings could be made from reaching for the sky. Ground-hugging/low-density/one-storey buildings such as prefabs were soon trembling in their low-slung boots. They felt like mansions owned by the Russian aristocracy after the 1917 revolution. Housing the masses in mini-Habsburg palaces on acres of expensive land had become a luxury too far.
This is what happens when lateral thinkers in the 'Home Counties' (as if every county is not a 'home' county to those who live in it) convince the political class that massive savings can be made by housing people in places they would never dream of living in themselves.
Science fiction writers have been predicting a future in which those able to afford mountainous mortgages will live in tiny semi-detached houses which have giant television screens. Those who cannot afford the mountainous mortgages will live in cloud-hugging apartment blocks and give cheery waves to the passengers of jumbo-sized aeroplanes which zoom by their kitchen windows. Children will be read fairy stories about times when people lived in pale prefabs with gardens.
With any luck science fiction should continue to get it wrong.

In the early nineteen fifties early years schooling in Twiverton won national renown for its expertise in the mathematics of 'positive negatives'. The moment a teacher 'found' that something had 'gone' an inquisitorial Herod-like search would be ordered which would sweep through the crevices of every possible loot-filled hiding-place.
The guile of Evil Coin Stealers (circa. 1952) was formidable and they developed a sixth-sense of when a Herod-like search for their ill-gotten coin-minted gains was imminent. In a flash they would artfully slip a stolen coin into the unsuspecting pocket of some naive fellow member of their class. And no pockets were as unsuspectingly naive as those which belonged to 'Tubby' Lard of Woodhedge Road.
Prisoners in Russia (circa.1952)who were planning to escape from the socialist paradise that was the Gulag would endeavour to take a "cow" with them. A "cow" was the name they gave to some trusting innocent who they invited to accompany them on their bid for freedom. What was smart about having a "cow" in the wastes of Siberia was that - at least during the first weeks of the journey - it provided a guarantee against starvation. In the event of the escaping prisoners running out of food they could always eat their "cow."
'Tubby' Lard (who resided in a prefab with a famously well-stocked larder) fitted the "cow" mode to a cue. In a sense 'Tubby' was wasted in Twiverton. He was tailor-made for the wastes of Siberia. So when a coin at the village school was identified as having gone 'positive negative' and was 'found' to have 'gone' missing the inevitable was bound to happen. Within minutes of a Herod-like search being launched the coin was discovered in one of 'Tubby' Lard's bewildered deep-layered side-pockets. Quickly intimidated into making a false confession he was made to spend the rest of the afternoon standing in silence and staring at the blank brown expanse of the classroom wall. Staring at this blank brown expanse was the school's way of making pupils confess their sins. This caused great confusion for 'Tubby' as - being 'Tubby' - he was someone wwho had no sins to confess. His one great consolation was that no one tried to eat him.
The old man has always said that "Experience is a hard school." The young resident of prefab number twelve was in a 'wiser to the ways of the world' state of mind when, a few days later, the pupils of the school were given the sad news that King George VI had died. As 'Tubby' Lard stood to attention in the big school hall the identity of the Evil Coin Stealer who had placed the coin in his bewildered pocket became crystal clear. He remembered the warning words of William Blake, and they would stay with him for years to come:

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

Few people get lost in prefabs. Even fewer get locked up inside prefab attics, or toppl over fifth floor prefab balconies. The great secret of prefab design is that it stretches minimalism to undreamt of heights. There is no fear of darkened basements in prefabs, or nightmares of walking down endless corridors in search of the bedroom you kip in, or of being gripped by moments of terrifying indecision about whether to use the downstairs or the upstairs toilet, or of succumbing to reckless thoughts of sliding down banisters. Compact uncluttered clarity of thought is what prefab living is all about.
Hardly a week goes by without hearing of someone plunging to their death over the cliff of their stairs. The phrase "as safe as houses!" is oxymoronic! That said, you have to hand it to members of the Stair-Makers Guild for managing to keep their dark lethal secret a secret for so long. "Man falls to his death down prefab stairs!" only has credibility as a headline in Mad magazine. (Last week's Mad! magazine special "look on the bright side!" issue carried an intriguing 'true life' report of how a clock on a motor car dashboard miraculously started working again for the first time in twenty-five years! This vintage "good news" event was a result of the said motor car crashing into a lamp post, killing the driver andpassenger, mowing down three pedestrians, and decapitating a stray dog.)
It cannot be said that the design of our own prefab is faultless. The steps that lead down from the back door into the yard are far too steep. Like the psychopath who lives next door they are a potential disaster that is yearning to happen.
For most of the time prefabs give off ethereal vibes which have a mellowing effect on frayed nerves. Yet as Adrian Denton in prefab number 36 will tell you, life on prefab estates likes ours has its "dark side." Adrian himself was once punched from one end of the green to another - and then hit with a leather belt! Moreover this grizzly incident took place directly in front of his own prefab. This is the prefab where his old man - a stony-faced bus conductor known as Hawkface - spends most of his free time staring out of the front window and watching his neighbours' every move.
So how, you have to wonder, did the coiled-attack machine known as Hawkface react when his own son was being so grievously assaulted within yards of his very own prefab? This is a trick question since it was Hawkface who was doing the assaulting.
Not that Hawkface would ever dare to take on Miss ('Pat' to her friends) Wafer Thin. Miss Wafer Thin was placed on this earth in order to support the philosophical contention that essence (inner reality) should not be confused with appearance (how things seem). Miss Wafer Thin might look like a pushover in any physical confrontation, but pushover she is not. Should any of Miss Wafer Thin's pupils step out of line her frail-looking knobbly elbows and puny fists are instantly transformed into manic razor-sharp flailing machete windmills. When the kid who wants to become a jockey was overheard making a derogatory remark about his new step-parents Miss Wafer Thin immediately took him on a ten circuit canter around the classroom and periodically hurled him over the imaginary fences that Miss Wafer Thin planned to have painted on the walls. Walk by this school hall even today (it stands between the churchyard and the My Full Moon public house) and you will notice that the indents made by the irrational exhuberance of those happy school days of yester-year are still visible.
When Miss Wafer Thin's work-out exercise was completed she would calmly sit the remnants of her self-traumatised class down and gently tell them how good the Germans were at making toys.

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

In the nineteenth century the poorly maintained state of its High Street led to Twiverton being known as 'Twiverton-on-the-Mud'. After being let home early from the village school on the grounds of feeling off colour the young 'Tubby' Lard gave onlookers an uncomfortable reminder of those distant horse manured, dirt-splattered days. As he strolled by Henry Fielding's glorious house (it was still standing then) a pent-up internal chemical implosion triggered a spontaneous 'Tom Jones'. A mysterious glistening substance (a "gift for the mother" is what Sigmund Freud called it) slid its luxurious way down the side of his leg and 'Tubby' experienced a mood of near Appollonian exaltation. He knew that the memory of the frisson-filled taboo-challenging open-air moment was going to stay with him until his dying day.
As always happens it was followed by a unsettling sense of deep foreboding reminiscent of the mood of post-coital melancholy at the brevity of human existence that was so poignantly described by the poets of Ancient Greece. It was only after he reached the fence of Mr Milligan's small-holding (which marks the southern border of the prefab estate) that 'Tubby' regained his composure. The day before the 'Metaphysics Today ' column of the Bath & Wilting Chronicle.
had asked readers what they made of a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche. 'Tubby' saw that the very same quotation was now painted up in bright red letters on the small-holding fence behind the telephone kiosk. The International Situationists were operating in Twiverton years before they ever made it big in Paris!
'Tubby' sensed that the quotation related to his own euphoric 'Tom Jones' experience, but he could not put his finger on exactly why.

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

While Twiverton is known far and wide for being "very old", the only buildings of ancient pedigree that survive are the church and the husk of a thirteenth-century farmhouse. A spirit of "cut-price utilitarianism" rules the roost in this hard-pressed part of the west country.
The Admiralty civil servants who live in the more spacious council houses have been portrayed all too negatively in these Files. Yet without the Admiralty civil servants there would have been no valiant (albeit ultimately doomed campaign) to halt the demolition of Twiverton's most prized residence. Henry Fielding (Bow Street magistrate and author of 'Tom Jones') lived here in the eighteenth-century. His house would still be standing now if it had not been ear-marked for 're-development' as a retreat for retired casino owners from Florida. A group of Admiralty civil servants (all of whom were prominent members of the Bath Dickens Society) had to be dragged out of the way of the approaching bulldozers when they tried to thwart the demolition squad's plans. Sadly the only person from our estate to participate in this heroic cause was the slick salesman from the immaculate corner prefab.
A complicating factor in the controversy over the demolition of Henry Fielding's house was the fact that a number of 'locals' who lived in Twiverton village were employed in the demolition industry. They regarded the securely employed 'cosmopolitans' employed by the Admiralty as "over-privileged post-materialists."
By the end of 1963 it was all over and Henry Fielding's crumbling yet once glorious residence had been razed to the ground. You can still feel something of the novelist's creative spirit lingering around the betting shop and the dry cleaners in the High Street. It is only a matter of time before a group of young writers bursts on to the country's literary scene and creates a unique Twivertonian oeuvre.

"I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name" -
William Morris

Prefabs might be the butt of cheap jokes but they do not come cheap. It costs a thousand pounds to build one! The annual cost of the prefab building programme launched in 1944 was £150 million.
This housing genre comes in a lush variety of forms. Some prefabs have walls that are smooth and straight, some have walls that are wavy and corrugated. Some prefabs have roofs that are flat and some have roofs that slope. Some prefab front doors are positioned bang in the centre while some are positioned towards one of the sides. Some estates have prefabs connected by big roads while others are connected by tiny footpaths. Some are mega-complexes with over a hundred prefabs while others are slim-line affairs with less than thirty.
At our last count we found there were no less than thirteen different types of prefab. (This
puts the eleven dimensions of the universe discovered by modern physics into the shade!) The strikingly diverse prefabs species (prefabnia differentia) includes the Hamish (types 1 and 2), Duplex Sheaths, Bricket Wood Specials, and the Blackburn Orlit. There is even one gem known as the Foamed Slag.
For the most part prefab evolution has followed the Darwinian principle of 'survival of the flattest'. This could all change if R.Buckminster Fuller's dome-shaped ones start to prove their worth. The estate we live on is made of the traditional 'AIROH Aluminium Bungalows'. (AIROH is an acronym for 'Aircraft Industries Research Organisation in Housing'.) Any day now a brass nameplate engraved with Airoh House Residence will make its dazzling one-up-man-ship appearance in the slick salesman's immaculate corner prefab.
Plans are being floated for estate residents to have holiday exchanges with people who live in Spooner, Universal, and Uni-Seco prefabs.

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

The tourist itinerary of the Bath Roaming City Coach Company is beginning to look rather jaded. Day trips to the usual suspects - Cheddar Gorges, Spooky Hole, Weston-Super-Mud, the Minehole Holiday Camp, and the Obese Lion Tamer's House - no longer pack their old punch. The masses are getting restless and hanker for wider horizons. Guided tours to the Tarrans prefabs of Hull, the Phoenixs of Bristol, and the Arcons of Newport could take the tourist industry by storm. It could just be a matter of time before UNESCO is nudged into giving these remarkable places the World Heritage Site recognition they surely deserve.

The prefabs on our estate were built according to the same uniform and standardised specifications. However it did not take long before each one acquired its own distinctive persona. Some stayed in a pristine blotch-less condition for years on end and their exteriors were gently caressed by the sweet scent of roses. An air of serenity was given off the moment you walked up their gilded paths. Others exuded a pungent body odour from the word go. Mysterious rusty stains were streaked across their lower firmaments. Stray hounds on the look out for hospitable terrains felt obliged to give them regular anointing.
There is one prefab (unfortunately it is situated next to our own) which has had more stray hound dog visits than most. Its first resident enjoyed climbing in through neighbours' windows and hurling their cutlery into the back yard. So there was sweet relief all round when this acrobatic prowess led to a move to Bristol and a professional career in goal for the Black Arabs football club. However the relief at his departure was rapidly dissipated the moment residents on the estate caught sight of who was moving in to take his place. It was the Swileys!
Those who have an over-romantic view of life in prefabs in the nineteen fifties always forget the Swileys. And almost every prefab estate had its Swileys. Cultural tourists would linger outside the Swileys' prefab for a brief spell of anthropological voyeurism. The slick salesman's immaculate corner prefab which had ivy twirling up its drainpipe, sparkling windows, a glittering polished interior and an aura of genteel tea and scones refinement had no appeal at all.

The slick salesman in the corner prefab warns everyone around here to be wary of the conceptual sleights of hand and over-grandiose leaps of high theory that - so he reckons - dominate so much of Continental thought. "British philosophy might be a shade uninspiring", he says, "but at least it keeps its empirical feet on the ground." The slick salesman says it is the same with the prefabs: "The noble Euclidian simplicity of a sharp-edged rectangle is what pragmatic pre-fabricated design is all about."
Philosophy has been big on this estate ever since we first moved in. Take the case of our "fastest in the west" milkman. He goes round knocking on doors and says: "What do you really mean when you say a pint of milk? Could you be making a category error here? If you don't start defining your terms and clarifying your assumptions you will get buggar all!"
The slick salesman says we could learn a lot from what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic. R.Buckminster Fuller has been trying to persuade the Beech Aircraft Company to criss-cross the planet with circular dome-shaped prefabs and abandoning the sharp-angled straight lined ones hat you see over here. "Should the rectangle be encircled?" is now the 'Big Prefab Question'. Thumb through the latest issue of the Burlington Magazine of Connoisseurs (a much coveted publication on our estate) and you will see that prefab aestetics is now the talk of the town. In one of its now legendary editorials it declared there was something chic about prefabs:

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

157,000 prefab homes were built between 1945 and 1949. There was one spell when a new one was going up every twelve minutes! These pale pads were more than just temporary sticking plaster covering the gaping hole of the post-war housing shortage. They provided a harbour refuge after the ordeal of war. This was a utopia that worked!
The scarcity value of prefabs was such that some residents began to see themselves as a kind of reserve aristocracy in waiting. If the Duke and Duchess of Somerset suddenly keeled over then Mr and Mrs Swiley in prefab number twenty-five were ready to take their place! A sense of being one of the elect was to stay with prefab dwellers until the very end.
I was a big mistake of Aneurin Bevan, (Member of Parliament for Tredegar/Ebbw Vale from 1929 to 1960) to refer to prefabs as "chicken huts" and "rabbit hutches." This was bound to offend the amour propre of prefab residents. After all, the title of the political tract he wrote - In Place Of Fear - neatly encapsulated the mission of the prefabs.
When the Admiralty moved from London to Bath the civil servants were housed in te more spacious council houses rather than in prefabs. Some of them continued to own houses in London. Yet missing out on prefab living can be seen as a great spiritual loss. Our pads might look a shade cramped to those who glide by in chauffeur-driven Ministerial saloons, but just as the preface of Das Kapital warns readers there can be no "royal road" to science, so there can be no short-cut to grasping the Zen Of Prefab Life. Evenings have to be spent gazing into embers of the small coal fire, watching slivers of moonlight flicker on the aluminium-lined walls, and listening to the skid of bicycle tyres on the wet road outside. Only then can this compact architectural form make its expansive presence felt.
George Orwell should never have spent his final days in the winter of 1950 marooned in an isolated cottage on a windswept Scottish island. His mistake was to believethat "an uncomfortable, almost prison-like atmosphere" is par for the course in council housing. A stay on a convivial prefab estate would have lifted his spirits and arrested his decline. However he did get one thing right. By 1984 the prefab era was over and these pockets of freedom had been all but extinguished.

The prefabs went up because other places had been knocked down. Half a million houses were flattened between July 1940 and March 1945 and a further quarter of a million badly damaged. Twiverton got off lightly. (Although the twenty-seven people who were killed in the bombing
might not agree). It could have been worse: the Railway Inn and the parochial school were hit, but no one was inside at the time.
Ten miles to the west of the prefabs is the city of Bristol. This was a big target for Adolf Schicklgruber's bombers and over fourteen hundred people died. Three miles to the east of our prefabs is the city of Bath. Bombing Bath formed part of the Baedecker raids on Britain's historic cities. The RAF bombed Lubeck on March 28th and March 29th, and Bath was hit in 'revenge'. The attacks on Bath on April 25th and 26th 1942 left four hundred and seventeen people dead. (The pilots based at near-by RAF Colerne were away on week-end leave at the time!) The Nazis felt jubilant when they were flattening cities like Warsaw and perfecting plans to deport millions to gas chambers. But when bombs started to fall on Germany's cities they got quite upset.
My parents had a close shave in Bristol. One night my mum was too tired to go to the air raid shelter. It received a direct hit and the couple who lived next door were killed. They then moved to Bath and arrived just in time for the bombing there. The bombs missed them. (Although, in my mum's case, the polio germs did not.)

The old man works as a furnace bricklayer for Derro Enamels. Most of his jobs with Derro have been in Italy, but he has worked in a dozen or more other countries as well. When he is abroad he sends us a postcard every three weeks or so. We line them up next to the clock on the mantelpiece in the sitting room. Usually the postcards are black and white, but now and again we get one which is in full colour (and sometimes with curled edges as well.) They usually show grand buildings: opera houses, concert halls, palaces, and splendid city squares with towerclocks and fine sculptures. When you look at them it is hard to imagine that these places belong to a continent which, just a few years ago, was soaked in the blood of slaughter!
The writing on the reverse of each postcard takes the form of neat capital letters and is always written in blue biro. Our address is written on the right-hand side:

24 Newtin Road
Twiverton
Somerset
England/Inghilterra

(Over the last six years we have had postcards from France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Rumania, Yugoslavia, and Portugal. The old man was set to build an enamels furnace in Turkey when the physical demands of the work got too much for him).

On the reverse left-hand-side of the postcard is a short phrase. This will also be in blue biro and capital letters. It will either be "LOVE FROM ME" or "ALL GOES WELL."

'Britain explodes nuclear bomb!', 'War in Korea!', 'Troops in Suez!, 'Street fighting in Budapest!' These are some of the headlined fragments of history that have richocheted around the prefab's aluminium-lined walls.
During our first decade here it was the wireless (with its two gleaming black dials) and the Daily Mirror (with its tension-packed Garth cartoons) which were the two main sources of news. If one of the prefab residents happens to be is a solicitor (admittedly this is a shade unlikely) you can be almost certain that it will be the Daily Telegraph which will thud on to the front door mat. If one of the prefab residents is an office clerk (this does happen) it will be a Daily Express thud. If one of the prefab residents is a labourer (and this is not a big 'if') there will be a Daily Mirror thud.
The warmest corner of the prefab is the North-West Passage (Canada is turned on it head here). This is where we have strategically placed the wireless. It is next to the fireplace and a half a dozen strides away from the draughts that sometimes whistle in through the door to the kitchen. The wireless has brought us nerve-tingling episodes of Dick Barton - Special Agent! (cruelly taken off air in 1952) and- from 1953 on - Jet Morgan's Journey Into Space. In 1954 we were ordered to end our football game on the green in order to listen to the broadcast of Wolverhampton Wanderers' epic 3-2 victory over Honved.
From 1951 on the latest hit songs were broadcast on Radio Luxembourg. If the old man was on his settee sleeping berth he would cry out "Turn that dirge off!" the moment we found the famous 208 metres frequency wave band. Of course if we hit wavelength 208 during the advertising slot when the velvet-smooth voice of 'Horace Batchelor' ('Horace Batch' to his pals) was slithering its way down the ether no "Turn that dirge off!" would ever be heard.
Today it is hard to believe that world famous K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m was once a nondescript Anyplace Anywhere Town known only for its chocolate factory and the rather lewd gnomes that were kept in its front gardens. Ask people to name the inventors of epoch-changing technology such as the electric light-bulb and the jet engine and their minds will go blank. Ask them to name the inventor of the 'infra-dig' method of winning money on the football pools and Horace's name will be delivered in seconds. The eight illustrious letters of Horace's home town are whispered into the Radio Luxembourg microphone with a hushed reverence. Saint Keyne (who founded the famed settlement in the fifth century) would demand nothing less.
A few sour and discordant voices say that K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m only found its place on the map of world consciousness in order to ensure that 'Big Pools Win Seeking Postal Orders' safely winged their way into Horace's K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m Post Office account. In fact Horace was a "most sincerely, folks!" Hughie Green kind of guy who genuinely believed that wealth, like muck, should be spread around. Since his famous 'infra-dig' method was first revealed to the world back in 1948 no less than twelve million pounds has poured from Horace's own post office account into the coffers of the masses. Whether Horace himself actually made any money from his 'infra-dig' method is what air cadets learn to call a "known unknown".
In recent years the word 'Batch' has come to be used as shorthand argot for the musty off-putting odour that batchelors who refrain from regularly washing their bed linen, socks and under-garments are said to reek of. 'To Be Batched' means succumbing to the illusion that winning Instant Wealth on the football pools also delivers Lifelong Happiness. Yet snaring the fickle Goddess of Happiness is a far trickier business than this. Traps sleeping under bridges in Winter have been known to pull it off, while some multi-millionaires sob themselves to sleep in luxury hotel suites. This is a truth that 'Horace Batch' never came round to spelling out to his listeners. That said, without his K-e-y-n-s-h-a-m incantations and 'infra-dig' dreams the nineteen fifties would have been a more sombre decade.

Ernest 'the paintbrush' Goldfinger is the estate's leading interior designer. He claims to be related to the famous Hungarian architect Erno Goldfinger (who was cruelly maligned in one of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels). Ernest 'the paintbrush' said the decor of our own prefab shows "a deft touch."
The sitting-room (socially aspiring types call it the living-room) is jam-packed with all kinds of
objets d'art. These include an elegant lampstand which reminds my mum of her lost past. A carved wooden statue of an African tribesman holding a spear. A stool that could once have been in van Gogh's room in Arles. An Escalado horse-race set, a box of Meccano, a wine jug from the Albergo Ristorante 'Continental' in Bassano Grappo. A plastic Airfix model of a Japanese Zero fighter plane,. A small silver bell bought in a souvenir shop in Brussels. A gyroscope, a music box, and a polished table with four matching chairs.
Strewth! Jagged football pitch markings have been scratched on to the polished table's smooth surface! Most kids would have been hit right, left and centre for doing something like that, and all I got was a gentle reproach. (Mind you, a gentle reproach in our place is enough to make you feel guilty for weeks on end).
Chiselling away at the secrets of Prefab Land (circa. 1954 / Somerset) is a daunting task. At least it is a big advance on ruining the surface of our polished table. James Joyce (circa. 1904 / Dublin) spent years chiselling away at his past. The landlord of Twiverton's Martello Tower Tavern says it is best to leave the past alone. "It can drive you to drink" he says.

Our estate is crammed full with all kinds of cutting edge all-mod-cons conveniences. What a symbol of high modernity a prefab is! One minute you are retrieving a bowl of custard from a gleaming enamel-walled refrigerator and the next minute you are stretching out your legs out in a sparkling enamel bath! It is little wonder that those of us who live on the cusp of the technology of the future are prone to yearn for the simplicity of a more gadget-free past.
The doctor's surgery in Twiverton has a reassuring sign on the entrance to the waiting room which says "The ancients are not far away!" If a hundred years is equated to one life span, then the Roman colony of Twivertonium was here just twenty life spans ago! Go back two life-spans and the vineyards left by the Romans were still thriving! Dig up a back garden in Twiverton today and there is every chance that you will unearth the remains of a Roman coffin! No wonder they say that we take the vistas of eternity in our stride!
Back in Anglo-Saxon times Twiverton was known as Weir Town - no, not Weird Town - and its assets were sizeable enough to get it a mention in the Doomsday Book. A few centuries later it was known as 'Two-ford-town' (which is what 'Twiverton' originally meant). In 1876 it was officially re-named 'Twiverton-on-Avon', although the 'on-Avon' part is seldom heard. This change in title was not some nouveau riche bid at latching on to a grander title. If this had been the case 'Twiverton-upon-Avon' would have become the new name. 'Twiverton-on-Avon' was an act of desperation. It was a bid to stop letters being mistakenly sent to Tiverton in Devon - which is something which continues to this day. So send all those letters, parcels and postcards back to us, you pillaging piratical Tivertonians!
In 1792 Twiverton's home-based weavers were dealt a mortal blow when 'Blue Dye' Bamford and Cooke opened up a Worsted Spinning Mill by the river. ('Blue Dye' because of the blue stains that the mill's workers soon to be covered with). In 1839 a Twiverton heavy squad was dispatched across the river to support a 'votes for working-class men!' Chartist rally in Weston village. Even today the Ruling Classes still tremble at the mention of the sans culottes of Twiverton! In the 1840s churches in neighbouring cities organised special collections to stop unemplyed Twivertoniand from starving. The railway that cut its way through Twiverton in 1840 gave London and Bristol-bound train passengers a heart-rending glimpse of just how bad things were here.
Members of the upper middle-class in the nearby city of Bath used to purse their lips and adopt a sniffy tone of voice if the word 'Twiverton' ever came up in conversation. (Nowadays they ensure it never does). The book Highways and Byways in Somerset was a favourite read in these circles. It was published in 1911 - three years before the start of World War and the Age Of Technological Genocide. The book has never been on sale in Twiverton. This is not simply because there has never been a bookshop in Twiverton. It is because the author, Mr Edward Hutton, comes out with the horrendous howler that "Twiverton is not to be altogether despised, for it is very old."
In 1805 Jane Austen reported going on a "pleasant walk" to Twiverton. Being "a good egg" (to use a favourite phrase of the old man) she does not mention despising anything.

Living with no upstairs (this is the cue for "in more ways than one") helps give prefab residents a well-grounded sense of identity. Prefabs were originally expected to last, at best, for ten years. That faint hearted deadline was passed yonks ago! In fact prefabs could be standing tall (in a manner of speaking) for decades to come. Some extra padding in the walls, well-targeted repairs to the roof, and a few licks of fresh paint would be enough to give them a massive life-prolonging boost.
Not that anyone is going to let on to this just now. Lips will remain tightly sealed and people will stay stum. The mouth-watering prospect of moving into real council houses with walls made of brick and swish upstairs toilets is being dangled in front of everyone's noses. Carefully laid plans to organise hunger strikes to stop the prefabs being torn down have been put on hold.
Moving out of our prefab estate should be a straightforward operation. It will not take the demolition squad long to strip the landscape of these thin-slivered ghostly-pale architectural forms. They say it will take just two days to move the residents out of their prefabs. Taking the prefabs out of the residents is going to be a rathr trickier operation. A yearning to return has been buried deep within our psyches. One day it will force its way up through the acres of concrete and tarmac and explode into the daylight as a forest of glorious sunflowers.

The post-war Labour Government (1945-51) made a bid at nudging the "to those that hath shall be given" principle to one side. People who might have been left permanently homeless were given temporary homes. Because building materials were in short supply at this time scrap metal (such as aluminium from war planes) was used to build prefabs. This means estates like ours were fighters from the word go!
The first time a prefab was allowed to make a public exhibition of itself was in May 1944 when a prototype prefab went on public display in London's Tate Gallery. Soon tens of thousands of factory-built units were being loaded on to lorries, transported to open spaces, cemented into the ground, smeared with asbestos, and connected to water mains and electricity cables. There was even some wild futuristic talk of connecting them to telephone lines!
The cities which had been bombed the most like Coventry and Hull were put at the head of the prefab queue. Places filled with medium-sized piles of rubble like Bristol and Bath were not far behind. To those who had been stuck in dingy basement flats, or were squatting in army camps, or making do in Salvation Army hostels, the offer of a prefab key came like manna from heaven.
The official remit of the 1944 Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act was to provide "a temporary solution to the post-war housing shortage." Some felt they were little more than "tin cans" and deserved more permanent cladding. Others felt they were not temporary enough and that money would be far better spent on country estates rather than on prefab estates. After all this was a time when there were grand country houses with leaks in their bow wings and crumbling porticos!
Evelyn Waugh does not seem to have been unduly concerned about the post-war housing shortage. On March 13 1944 he wrote this to his friend Lady Dorothy Lygon about the book that would be known as 'Brideshead Revisited'.

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

The prefabs never had their Evelyn Waugh (which is perhaps just as well). No very beautiful book was ever written about them. The people who lived in them had plenty of troubles beyond those which they made themselves, and they faced up to them with courage and a spirit of fortitude. These Prefab Files salute them!