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."

Sometimes a strong undertow of emotion emerges out of nowhere and overwhelms the most ordinary of days. This is what 'Tubby' Lard found on a Monday morning in the early spring of 1960.
He had woken up earlier than usual to find that the idea of walking to school rather than getting the bus had implanted itself into his brain. 'Tubby' was a pupil at the Weymouth House Technical School. Such was the narrowness of its curriculum (metalwork, technical drawing, painting and decorating and the like) that "technically" Weymouth House Technical School could hardly be said to be a school at all.
Soon 'Tubby' was strolling down How Hill and inhaling the rich whiff of brewery yeast that lingers around the half-ajar door of the Old Crown. (There are no other half ajars in the Old Crown). He took a smart semi-military style left turn at the junction of the hardware shop and the newsagents, and marched towards the grime-encrusted (and some say spook-infested) railway arch that borders the fast and furious Lower Bristol Road. Just as 'Tubby' was about to congratulate himself on his cracking pace and growing sense of physical vigour an unknown girl zoomed by him on her bike and shouted: "Out of the way, you fat slob!"
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me!" These defiant words had often chanted been chanted on his prefab estate, but always without any real conviction. The bike girl's words did not simply hurt 'Tubby'. They hit him with such a force that - a mere six months later - 'Tubby' was tubby no more. What the malign jibe did was to galvanise him out of his flabby "pile some more sugar on to my Weetabix" lethargy. The Prefab Weightlifting Club that was set up a few weeks later and covered with No Pain, No Gain! posters would never have come into existence without the incident of the bike, the girl, and the grime-encrusted railway arch.
The malign jibe-hurling girl would have been filled to the brim with energy, verve and high-fuelled confidence as she sped by the pedestrian 'Tubby' on her fast-moving projectile. The uniform she was wearing revealed she was en route to the girls' grammar school for six hours
of the engrossing Renaissance Humanistic Studies which 'Tubby' - trapped in his Technical school - secretly craved. He knew for sure that she would be a fully paid-up member of the Zero-Sum Tribe (the one sponsored by a Mr F. Nietzsche) whose core doctrine is the more bile you can puke out on the unthreatening likes of 'Tubby' the better you are going to feel. 'Tubby' on the other hand was a fully paid-up member of the "I'll Be Nice To Them And Then They Might Be Nice To Me Liberal Club' which seemed to ensure he was on a hiding to nothing.
The intersection of the trajectories of the jibe-hurling girl and the pedestrian 'Tubby' at the foot of the grime-encrusted railway arch poses the perennial "Who would you rather be?" question. Would you rather be the overweight, kindly and painting and decorating-bound
'Tubby' - a slow-moving target for any passing chariot-racing Wagnerian spear-thrower - or the lithe lean-limbed fast-moving buoyant girl who gives out exultant and cathartic verbal kicks to pedestrian peasants as the wind races through her hair?
With the passage of time 'Tubby' Lard came to feel a strange debt of gratitude to the "fat slob!" yelling girl whose face he could never quite remember. Years later he would find himself wondering whether she went on racing through life with the same elan, or suffered some sobering reversal of fortune under her own grime-encrusted railway arch.
For 'Tubby' Lard there were some consolation fruits from his moment of adversity. Fading photographs of weighlifting champions from forty years ago show him with a "my claws are no longer blunt" tattoo on his muscle-bound chest. His eyes have a distant look, as if he is searching out for that bike-riding girl.

"It's a free country!" is the phrase that is most often heard on our estate. "It's a man's world!" is the one lots of girls come out with. (They have a steely glint in their eyes when they say it which means it is not going to stay that way for much longer). "Looking for something to do!" is what kerb-scuffing kids say on lacklustre grey overcast days. "More than flesh and blood can stand!" and "Hindsight is no good!" what Displaced Persons whose lives have been ruined by war are heard to say. The old man is always coming across "tenth-rate punks" when he goes into town. (His punks are always "tenth-rate": so what would a "first-rate" punk look like?") My cousin from South Wales says he will knock anyone who is looking for trouble "into the middle of next week!" (And he would). "No bloody use to anyone!" is the phrase that always springs to people's minds when they gaze across at the Smiley's prefab.
The old man remains a shade bitter about being turned down by the armed services (on undisclosed health grounds) after he tried to sign up in 1939. If they had let him join might have ended up "dying in the western desert" (another favourite phrases.) The old man helped build the floating Mulberry Harbours that were used in the D-Day invasion. So although he will never know the camaraderie of a Royal Legion Club his labouring efforts made a difference.
"So what did you do in the war?" I once accusingly asked him as a young kid as we ate marmalade and toast on the kitchen table. "I was in the Japanese Navy!" was his lightening reply.

Two paintings hang in our sitting-room. One is by an unknown artist and shows a forest, a cloud-streaked sky, and a path stretching out into the unknown future. The other is The Chinese Girl (some people call it the Green Lady) by Vladimir Tretchikoff. It shows Lenka, the Russian painter's girl friend, who he met in a New York restaurant. The Twiverton Literary Supplement has dubbed it "the Mona Lisa of the British Working Class."
The old man enjoys sitting in his armchair, striking a Swan Vesta match, lighting up a roll-up of Old Holborne tobacco, and gazing up at The Chinese Girl. Art on prefab estates seems to send
numinous shivers down your spine and conjures up the sound of a guitar being played on a lonely hillside. In order to break out of its spell the old man will say to me: "Nip down the shop, son, and get me another ounce of Old Holborne tobacco and a box of matches."
The downcast eyes of The Chinese Girl take everything in -the laughter, the hopes, the arguments, the forebodings. You can stare at The Chinese Girl for all you are worth but she never returns your gaze. Even surprise tactics like creeping in to the room on all fours and firing off a lightening glance in her direction will not catch her off guard. One theory about The Chinese Girl is that she is brooding over the indignities that colonialism has inflicted on Asia. Another is that she feels angry about being called a Girl when anyone can see she is a grown up woman. Sometimes you feel she has some kind of inkling about what is going to happen to the residents of this prefab. The 'Que sera sera!' song on everyone's lips - the one about "the future not being ours to see" - might not apply to The Chinese Girl. A half-returned glance from her
might give the whole game away.
Prints of The Chinese Girl were mass produced from 1952 on, and the old man is pleased that he was one of the first to buy one. This would not impress every one. One day I was taking a stroll around Bath and spotted The Chinese Girl on display in the window of the art shop in Green Street. Two well-heeled characters were having an animated conversation and staring at the painting with an unusual intensity. Their talk was punctuated by hoots of laughter. "The very essence of contemporary plebeian taste!" one of them chortled.

Hidden behind the darts board in the back room of the Ring O ' Bells is a cache of the landlord's classic reads. A favourite is W.H.Davies' Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. How drinkers love to read the graphic description it gives of the author having one of his legs sliced off while jumping trains! Chapter three of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle depicts "the slaughtering machine" of the Chicago stockyards. The landlord says it "pre-figuring" the slaughtering machines for humans that were set up four decades later in Central and Eastern Europe. There was a time when he was the only pub landlord in Bath who used the term "pre-figuring", and nowadays you cannot order a ginger beer without the landlord asking whether it will be "pre-figuring" a request for a packet of crisps.
Jane Austen is big amongst visitors to Bath, but Flann O'Brien is big amongst the locals. In The Hard Life he alerts readers to the fact that "all the persons in this book are real and none is fictitious even in part." You wonder how O'Brien's Gaelic character Macsamailliun Ui Phionasa -Maximillian O' Penisa feels about this.
The Bath & Wilting Chronicle once described the Ring O' Bells as "a shady place that is full of sunny people." "Shady people in sunny places" was how Somerset Maugham described his fellow residents in the South of France. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge is a great favourite in the Ring O'Bells. A hand-written note of Somerset Maugham is framed above the saloon bar which suggests that readers "look out for my stylish use of the colon."
The cache behind the dartboard contains a novel of Mikhal Sholokhov which describes the brutal treatment that was meted out to prisoners of war in Russia. This touched a raw nerve with the old man. His father had been a prisoner of war in Germany during the First World War. (He had been a coalminer in South Wales who enlisted in the army, was captured, and spent the last year of the war working in a German coalmine. By the time he retuned home his black hair had turned white).
After reading the Sholokhov passage the old man got quite angry. "My father was not treated like that!" he said. Then we had one of our kitchen debates. Was Sholokhov giving an implicit stamp of moral approval to barbarous acts or war. Or was he just telling the truth about what war is like. This debate was taken back to the Ring O'Bells, and is still going on there today.
One day a copy of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet On The Western Front found its way from the darts board cache into our prefab. My mum looked really surprised when she saw it. "It was banned in Germany" she whispered.
This prefab is more than a few sheets of aluminium riveted together with six windows added on. It is a literary gold mine!

Samuel Coleridge wrote about placing a tiny lantern of history on the stern of his ship to illuminate the waters through he sailed. This is what we will have to do for the prefabs!
Prefabs (and perhaps some prefab residents as well) have built-in drawers. One day the curators of the Victoria & Albert Museum will hold a Life in British Prefabs exhibition which will be sure to take Europe by storm. Those curators would give anything for the contents of our prefab's drawers. Take a lucky dip into them today and you could draw out a miniature replica of Juan Manuel Fangio's racing car made out of pieces of Meccano, a night sky map from the London Planetarium, a picture of Welsh international John Charles in his new Juventus football kit, a Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained! Children's Book Club label, an empty box filled with the aroma of the old man's favourite Dutch cigars, a photograph of kids swimming in the baths in Koblenz, a Smoke Gets In Your Eyes hit-record by the Platters. All of these priceless artefacts will vanish away into a Sargasso Sea of lost time when the day of the Big Move comes.
What would Friedrich Nietzsche have made of the prefabs? That was what someone was asking in the jug and bottle of the My Full Moon the other day. The hard man of power often said the weak should perish, so it seems more than likely that he would have wanted our flimsy weak prefab structures to perish as well. Yet in the final days of his life it is possible that he started to have second thoughts. As an old man Nietzsche saw a horse being savagely beaten. Instead of joining in the fun and giving the horse an extra beating he embraced it and started to sob. Perhaps an older wiser Nietzsche would have embraced the prefabs as well. Their transitory life-span makes you want to "redeem the past" and transform "every 'It was' into 'I wanted it thus!'"

There is tons to read in our prefab. Encased inside richly-layered dark red embossed covers are a Book Of Hobbies, eight encyclopaedic Books Of Knowledge, a Concise Oxford Dictionary ("written in 1917 before my brother's death " says its eerie preface), and three volumes of The Bricklayer which the old man has been itching to trowel through. These books convey the same sense of gravitas that you find in the study of the Silk-Farr's Italian-style villa. "When you walk into some prefabs", says Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic, "you find yourself wondering if you have entered a side entrance of the Bodleian Library!"
Other not so literary cargo you find scattered across our prefab deck includes some I-Spy booklets; a biography of General Rommel; and a fitness training guide compiled by a top Australian coach. ("Mix different types of breakfast cereal together and go running on sand dunes!" is his best tip). There are copies of magazines like Woman's Own, Woman, Tit-Bits, and Reveille. A booklet by Charles Atlas on his famed dynamic tension technique (seven stone weaklings who have sand kicked in their faces would give anything to get hold of a copy). Three Biggles books, and a crime detective thriller with a garish cover called I'll Say She Does!
Resting on top of our wooden Van Gogh-style stool is a copy of Encounter, a high-powered journal of ideas carrying a special issue on 'The God That Failed'. ('Tubby' Lard went into one of his sulky moods after he borrowed it after thinking it was a manual on the best places to meet girls).
According to Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic Encounter would have folded up years ago if it had not been for the undercover payments it receives from the American Government's Central Intelligence Agency. "This piece of 'soft power' has more propaganda value than the combined forces of the Red Army Choir and the Bolshoi Ballet. It punches more Cold War weight than the Reader's Digest! and beats V.I. Lenin's Speeches at Party Congresses (1918-1922) for a pulsating read."
One of the most flicked through magazines here is The Ring. This sells so many copies it does not need undercover payments from anyone. An issue from 1959 is packed with coverage of Floyd Patterson's defeat by Ingemar Johansson in the world heavyweight championship. It also carries a short report on an amazing young boxer called Cassius Clay. Try and avoid making the big mistake of mixing up The Ring boxing magazine with Wagner's Ring opera which Adolf Schicklgruber and his Nazi gangster pals used to rave on about. (As for Wagner's music Mark Twain was on to something when he said it "is better than it sounds.")
Poetry has always been big on this prefab estate, and T.S.Eliot's The Love Song of J. Afred Prufrock was once all the rage. After coming across Eliot's Selected Poems and the piece on 'Bubank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar' we all had second thoughts. Books and poems can be weapons of murder and some are best kept hidden away on the coalhouse floor.