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

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

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

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

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

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