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

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

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

The nearest church to our estate is Saint Michael. It is popularly known in the prefabs as Saint Michael Is No Angel. Biblically speaking Saint Michael was not just any old angel by a 'top dog' archangel whose job was to stand up for the people of Israel. (Not too effectively if the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties are anything to go by).
The Sunday School organized at Saint Michael has been a great success, and this is largely the result of two magical ingredients: (1) Sunday School meetings never last very long. (2) They always end with an unexpected treat. The hallowed tradition is to draw Sunday School to a close
with the solemn and much appreciated ceremony of the peace-loving vicar's assistant handing out cigarette cards displaying (for the girls) glamorous Hollywood movie stars standing on top of
tanks and fighter planes and other gruesome instruments of war, and (for the boys) cigarette cards which simply display tanks and fighter planes and other gruesome instruments of war. ("Any means necessary to win over young Christian soldiers!" are the vicar's assistant's cheery words.)
A Sunday morning dawned when Reg Downhill was coaxed out of his marathon-long Sunday morning lie-ins in water-bottle andblanket-swaddled prefab number nineteen by rumours of the
generous cigarette card largesse bestowed y the vicar's assistant. From then on he never looked back. After being confirmed into the Church of England there was even talk of the formerly moody/sulk-prone/and teddy boy-inclined Reg being offered a place on the coveted front row pew!
Older residents of Twiverton still recall the time when the coveted front row pew never went unoccupied. Originally reserved for the higher ranks of the gentry the coveted front road pew was fatally undermined by the lethal pincer movement of this once glittering social formation's demise and the rise of mass society in the shape of a burgeoning council house building programme. Within the space of ten years what the Saint Michael Is No Angel Parish News called "this tranquil, well-turned out and Evelyn Waugh-like parish" had been utterly transformed. The coveted front row pew was all but emptied of its traditional sitters and served as an enduring reproach to the less illustrious present. Although Reg Downhill eventually went (there is no other way of putting this) downhill and succumbed to the spiritual charms of cider drinking in Englishcombe village people still recall the time when the same Reg had come within a hair's breadth of being offered a place on the coveted front row pew.
Stroll through the tranquil grounds of this part Saxon/part Norman/part D-I-Y ancient church and you come across two finely sculptured baroque-styled tombs. While the biting west wind has eroded the majority of its engravings and inscriptions, there is one which stubbornly refuses to disappear. It has become the lodestar that guides residents of Twiverton's two prefab estates through the travails of life.
"Behold I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; be ye therefore wise as serpents and innocent as doves." (Matthew 10:16).
Bouquets of flowers are no longer left strewn on the church yard's two baroque-styled tombs. At most you will see the occasional sighting of a solitary rose or daffodil. Follow the twists and turns of the churchyard's winding path at dusk and you might see the phantom-form of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He sits on the grass and re-reads the 'Ever Again' poem he wrote so long ago. It has become a great favourite in Twiverton, and its heart-chiselled words - "landscape of love", "we set forth, two together", "Among flowers. Facing the sky" - seem to whisper their way through the trees.