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.