No election posters have ever been glued up on the windows of prefab number forty-eight, and its coalhouse door has always remained brazenly bare. Ever since 1957 a special aura has enveloped prefab number forty-eight. Any thing as prosaic as an election poster - even a collector's item such as 'Vote for Gilbert Youth and World Government!' with its picture of the surf rolling in on a beach in Hawii - would detract from the prefab's special mystique. There is something quite unique about prefab number forty-eight, and it is not too hard to pin the source of this uniqueness down. Prefab number forty-eight has four residents, and one of them is a certain Miss Ann Brown-Sloane.
If any election posters were ever to go on display in Miss Ann Brown-Sloane's prefab her favoured prospective member (of Parliament that is) would win by a landslide. No one took very much notice of Ann Brown-Sloane until the summer of 1957 when in the space of a few months she blossomed into a new persona and was crowned undisputed Prefab Beauty Queen Of The Year. Since then her radiant fragrance has fuelled countless fantasies in the inner recesses of pre-fabricated nooks and crannies. Fortunately Ann Brown-Sloane remains quite unaware of the dramatic shift that has taken place in how the world perceives her. She knows absolutely nothing of the guffaws of crass laughter that sometime erupt in our religious studies lessons. (Whenever the class stumbles across the famous line in the Bible about not "coveting your neighbour's donkey" 'Tubby' Lard always calls out: "But sir, my copy of Exodus says 'You should not covet your neighbour's ass").
Ann Brown-Sloane might live in a six hundred or so square foot prefab like the rest of us, but hers is the only one which is permanently bathed in an aura of sultry, sweltering, glitzy, pulse-racing, heart-thumping Californian-style glamour. Ann has been a regular attender of the Prefab Philosophy Club's seminars. The only one she arrived late for was on Arthur Schopenhauer, and one of his quotations had been chalked up on the board. (Sexual desire was the theme: "It is so very much the chief thing that no other pleasures make up for the deprivation of its satisfaction.") Everyone's face stayed a bright red for the entire duration of the seminar, and Ann felt driven to remark that it "had been the oddest philosophy meeting she had been to so far."
Imagine the amazement which hit us one evening (twilight was falling and our football match on Woodhedge Road had been called to a halt) when we spotted Phil (now nicknamed 'Dark Horse') Perkins silhouetted in Ann Brown-Sloane's bedroom window! Phil had been a moral example to the youth of the estate and a mainstay of the Saint Michael Is No Angel Sunday School. At least he had been until his crisis of faith. This crisis had been gestating for some time. Phil became convinced that some of the core doctrines of Christianity were metaphors rather than literal truths. He told the vicar's assistant that the Virgin Birth was "a metaphor designed to hide embarrassment over sex" and that the Resurrection was "a metaphor to mask our fear of death." As it turned out, however, it was neither of these vital doctrinal issues that finally led Phil to severing his Sunday School links. It was the trauma of The Shock which did this.
An ever-dutiful son Phil had thrown himself into a frenetic burst of housework activity when his parents were away on a day trip to Weston-on-the-Mud. All was going well until he had a sudden impulse to go into uncharted waters and tidy up - not just his own bedroom drawers - but his parents' drawers as well. this was where Phil discovered a mysterious package tightly wrapped up in yellowing musty pages of the local evening paper. (How many dark secrets have been concealed in yellowing musty pages of the Bath & Wilts Chronicle and Herald!) There was no way Phil could resist taking a fleeting peek at its inner contents. They might, after all, include the eleven subbuteo table football players he had been assured might come his way on his forthcoming birthday! No wonder Phil ('Dark Horse') Perkins' hands were trembling when the last wrapper of paper was removed.
A critical juncture in the strange journey that took Phil Perkins from being a morally upright stalwart of the Saint Michael Is No Angel Sunday School into a silhouetted form framed in Miss Ann Brown-Sloane's stylish back bedroom was the chalked-over kerbstone situated three yards behind Miss Ann Brown-Sloane's bushy back garden. This was where Ann stumbled across Phil's sobbing spread-eagled form and saw that one of his long shuddering legs was within a whisker of being hit by the silver-hubs of the wheels of the frenetically driven Co-operative Mobile Shop Van ("share number 24419!") which was due, at any moment, to career its jerky jolting way around the corner of Newtin Road.
What else could someone like Miss Ann Brown-Sloane do but offer the distraught Phil (soon to be 'Dark Horse') Perkins a helping hand, take him under her fragrant solace-bestowing wing, and invite him into prefab number forty-eight to regain her composure by listening to the episode of Hancock's Half Hour that was about to be broadcast on the Light Programme. "To think that the pair of them have been carrying on like that!" said Phil as his tear-drenched face tumbled - "like a leaf from a tree" as he would later say (quoting the poet W.B.Yeats) - into Ann's lap. "And carrying on like that in the sanctity of our prefab home!" "Crikey!" said Ann - and "Crikey!" again - when the true gravity of what Phil had found in the carefully wrapped parcel in his parents' bottom drawer finally began to sink in.

"Stone me, what a life!" (Tony Hancock).

The Shock that had been so artfully concealed inside the yellowing bundle of Bath & Wilts Chronicle and Herald newspapers with their tales of ruby anniversaries and prize vegetables went off like a grenade in a greenhouse. Phil Perkin's illusions about the mechanics of species reproduction were sent splintering into the cosmos. It was not so long ago that he had severely reprimanded Roland Bollard for the graffiti the resident of prefab number four had painted up on his prefab roof. (It said, in garish green and gold paint, "Every kid on this estate should be viewed as the symbolic representation of a thousand encounters of a highly sensual kind!") Now the stark truth of this message had been confirmed in all its visceral intensity. Hidden away in the shadowy interstices of a hitherto sedate drawer in Phil's hitherto sedate prefab was no pristine set of clean cut stiff upper lip Subbuteo table football players. There was a pristine set of five packets of contraceptives - plus the remains of a sixth from which the contents had been hurriedly removed. "In the end the truth always forces itself up towards the light!" said a plaintiff Phil as he gazed into Ann's deep azure eyes.
Hardly a day goes by now without Phil ('Dark Horse') Perkins either popping into Ann's place for some comforting moments of consolation or sitting down on the kerbstone outside her sweetly scented garden and idling away the hours by staring into a small plastic gadget which shows, with each click of the button, a new picture of women's breasts. Such are the depths to which some of the more vulnerable young residents of our prefab estate have been known to sink.