People just could not believe that a Prefab Philosophy Club had been set up on our estate. When
news of its existence got out we were besieged by newspaper reporters (plus an odd character from the wireless who claimed to know Radio Luxemburgh's Horace Batchelor) for days on end. Almost exactly a year later - this was bang in the middle of the conference we were running on
'The Conceptual Innovations of Wittgenstein and Spinoza' - our estate was besieged yet again. (Gary Bollard had told the Bath & Wilting Chronicle that Spinoza would be the star speaker without realising he had died some time ago). Even when the gentlemen of the press saw the doyen of logical positvism turn up from Wadham College to deliver a paper on Language, Truth and Logical Falsehoods the big wide world continued to suspect us of being up to some devious ploy. The deeply-ingrained assumption of all the powers-that-be was that prefabs and
philosophy -like oil and water - simply could not mix.
Dozens of Prefab Philosophy Clubs must have been set up in the nineteen fifties. We were never under any illusions about there being anything special about the intellectual terrain of our own estate. (Although the influence exerted by Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic in prefab number three cannot be totally discounted). That said, Jane Lewis in prefab number thirteen - who regularly burns the midnight oil reading the works of Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) - has now come round to questioning the idea that there really is such a thing as pure chance!
Over recent months speculation on the origins of our Prefab Philosophy Club has reached an unprecedented level of intensity, and no one in Twiverton was surprised to hear that the New York Revue Of Books is to commission a joint team from Princeton and Harvard to carry out a definitive investigation. Perhaps the time has come for someone who was actually present at
the club's founding meeting to set the record straight and help untangle the web of mythology that has accumulated over the years.
According to the orthodox standard version the idea of setting up a Prefab Philosophy Club surfaced after six of us had finished an over-vigorous football penalty-taking practice session against the large black metal gate that stands at the top of Woodhedge Road. As far as this background setting is concerned the orthodox standard version is absolutely correct. The orthodox standard version is also correct in stating that our group ended up sprawling out of the pavement, gazing up at a bright blue sky, and watching a solitary shining cloud in the shape of the British Isles hover directly above us. And the orthodox standard version is also correct in stating that someone - it was in fact 'Tubby' Lard - remarked of the cloud's semi-hallucinatory silver-glowing form: "It is as if the Gods have ripped out our country's page from their atlas of the world and magnified it a thousand times!" From this point on, however, the orthodox standard version gets it quite wrong.
Ann Brown-Sloane did not experience the shining hovering cloud as "a numinous epiphany!" or as some versions have it "a transcendental meeting up of Joan of Arc and William Blake!" Our small platoon did not draw in a deep breath, feel an idea palpably gestate out of the enchanted evening air, and spring to its feet vowing to shake British philosophy out of its insular torpor and show the Continentals how real philosophy should be done. The idea of setting up a Prefab Philosophy Club did not come on the evening of our over-vigorous penalty-taking practice session at all! As for the impact made by the solitary shining cloud in the shape of the British Isles we had all but forgotten about it until being reminded of its brief transitory existence in that celebrated Home Service wireless broadcast Principia Prefabrica: New Ideas From The Ivory Towers of Twiverton.
In fact the spark which ignited the idea of founding a Prefab Philosophy Club did not come until a full twenty-four hours after our over-vigorous penalty practice on Woodhedge Road had ended! The First Cause of our novel venture was not some epiphany heralded by the chance appearance of a silver cloud in the shape of the British Isles. It was 'Tubby' Lard standing in the queue at the 5A bus stop and hearing the distinguished editor of the Twiverton Literary Supplement (TLS) remark that the life led by residents on our prefab estate was "risibly claustrophobic!" Not "poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short" (which would have been reasonable enough) but "risibly claustrophobic!"