One of the great advantages about having rows with foreigners is that you have them on the defensive from the word go. After all, what are they doing in this country anyway! Voicing the great rallying cry of "Go back to your own country!" gives the likes of the Swileys untold pleasure.
This is not to to suggest that anti-foreigner jibes are often heard on this estate. For one thing not many foreigners live here. There is a sprinkling of Welshmen (who are by definition 'foreigners' since 'Welsh' is Saxon for 'foreigner'), plus a chap from Malta, a Jewish refugee from Germany, and a Pakistani family who are liked by everyone bar the Swileys. In a time-battered
terraced house that stands next to the super-highway known as the Lower Bristol Road there lives a lean, tough, agile looking woman who has close-cropped hair. She fought with the Polish resistance during the war. You can bet your bottom dollar the Swileys are not going to say "Go back to your own country!" to her.
For ninety-five percent of the time the prefab estate is a haven of good will and international understanding. But now and again, completely out of the blue, a malign incident of the anti-foreigner kind can blow up out of nothing. Take the regretable sequence of events that followed the scrap between the ever-sulky Ronnie Rogers who lives in prefab number forty-three and the "I want to be a taxi driver!" Mark Marshall who lives in prefab number fifteen. No one is really sure what sparked it all off. The documentation is thin and there is no clear-cut photographic evidence of the kind which shows Franz Ferdinand being assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914. The most plausible historical analysis suggests that Ronnie Rogers was hit for six by Martin Marshall during an improvised cricket match - and took it badly. Harsh words were spoken and within a blink of an eye a bitter inter-clan and publicly-aired dispute was being unleashed in the middle of Woodhedge Road. Even the driver of the ever frantic Co-operative Mobile Shop Van ("Share number 24419!") came to a brake-crunching halt in order to discover what was going on. After the initial burst of small arms fire personal abuse had been exhausted one of the big guns of the estate - Ronnie Roger's - was seen to enter the fray. Her arms were rigidly folded over a bright red apron showing pictures of cuddly teddy bears and her hair was in curlers. (The double pincer image of hair in curlers and cuddly teddy bears always spells big trouble). The lethal anti-foreigner card was played when Ronnie Roger's mum plucked two vitally relevant pieces of judiciously-weighed evidence out of the left holster of her cuddly teddy bear apron pocket. These exposed the outrageously illegitimate manner - tantamount her supporters say to an act of war - in which the unquestionably indigenous Ronnie Rogers had been hit for six by that treacherous outsider Martin Marshall.
Item One drawn out of the apron holster was the fact that Martin's mum and dad had been born in the Irish Republic (and in Cork as well!) Item Two was even more incriminating: it is a fact that the Irish Republic pursued a policy of neutality during the second world war! Put these two items together and the following devastating deduction can be made. Geo-politically speaking Martin Marshall was complicit with the Nazi war effort. This meant that Ronnie Rogers had been grievously wronged by someone who hits weak bowlers for six without due cause.