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.

The old man has an uncanny knack of being able to walk into a betting shop and place money on a horse that is destined to come in second. Unfortunately he always bets that the horse will come in first.
Over the years money has been regularly siphoned out of our modest rented prefab abode and into the splendid detached house owned by the There Is One Born Every Minute bookmaker. The old man remains serenely philosophical about the financial costs exacted by horse race betting on our domestic economy and says it is "just a bit of fun." It certainly is a bit of fun for the bookmaker.
On Saturday mornings the oldman joins a small platoon of betting enthusiasts in either the Saracen's Head, the Green Tree, the Empire Bar or (more often than not) Smith's Wine Vaults. At half hour intervals eighty-six year old Harold - the oldest and physically most precarious member of the group - is hurriedly dispatched to the There Is One Born Every Minute bookies with a clutch of betting slips shaking in his trembling hands. A quotation from Immanuel Kant has been painted on one of the walls of the betting shop:

It frequently happens that a man delivers his opinions with so much boldness and assurance that he appears to be under no apprehension as to the possibility of error. The offer of a bet startles him, and makes him pause.

(There are not many startled pauses in Smith's Wine Vaults).

Once we were awoken from our late afternoon slumbers by an enormous thud against the front door. It was followed by the spectacular sight of the old man dragging a brand new multi-layered Persian carpet into the sitting room. His system had 'worked' again - the chosen horse had come in second - but this time the 'winning' horse had been disqualified.
Even a modest sized win by a member of the Smith's Wine Vaults platoon triggers a switch into nostalgia mode. The group's founders - Arthur, Monty, and Harold - will recall the momentous day when the entire wad of Jim Smith's rent money was placed on a rank outsider called Rent Boy which - of course - won by a mile. The majority of horse race betters dream of 'A Big Win' which will enable them to sup ale not just on Saturdays but on week-day afternoons as well. However the Smith's Wine Vaults platoon takes a more balanced and pragmatic stance. They dream of a sequence of modest wins which will leave their existing style of life essentially undisturbed but provide them with an extra helping of largesse.
Arthur is a postman, Monty a hospital porter, and Jim a civil servant ('industrial grade'). Whenever a referee's name is required for some official form 'civil servant (industrial grade)' comes to the rescue. For the last thirty years Jim Smith has worked at a top secret Ministry of Defence underground arms depot (unmarked on any maps) that lies six miles to the east of Bath. It has been designated as a reserve bunker for key Government personnel in the event of a nuclear attack. During the second world war Jim Smith was taken to one side by the authorities and warned to "watch his step." His hard-heeled shoes always make a piercing rat-tat-tat sound as he paces corridors and pavements - you can hear his approach a mile off - and he had been half expecting to be told that the noise of his heels had been getting on the authorities' wick. In fact the infuriating rat-tat-tat sounds did not even get a mention. The severe reprimand he was given was for making remarks about the German origins of the Royal Family.
Before moving into his present flat in inner city Walcot (his neighbours are newcomers from the Caribbean) Jim Smith lived on the grand Blackway Estate which overlooks Twiverton. On Saturday mornings he would rat-tat-tat his way down the hill, call into our prefab for a smoke and a cup of tea, and then head off towards one of the neighbouring town's watering holes. Prior to taking his "egress" (as Laurel and Hardy like to say) he would remove a shiny silver coin from a trouser pocket and place it in the palm of my hand with a resounding "and the best of luck!" This sequence became as predictable as the water butt filling up after a heavy downpour of rain. However a Saturday morning arrived when Jim Smith donned his overcoat and was half way out of the back door without a backwards glance or even a hint of giving the obligatory cash donation. Custom and precedent cannot be flouted in this way! He even had the nerve to look offended when I shouted out "Got any money then!"
Despite this faux-pas Jim Smith continues to allow his name to be used as a referee or witness in any 'official applications. He is one of the few people known in our circle who holds the coveted 'professional' (albeit industrial grade) status that the authorities require. The Dublin-born Jim Smith also acts as a referee/witness on Britain's political record in Ireland. Drinkers in Smith's Wine Vaults have learned a lot about the dark side of Oliver Cromwell and the atrocities carried out at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649. "For people in Ireland these events took place just three
lifespans ago !" he says. (He was using the Twiverton "one life span = one hundred years rule"). Once Jack Paisley from Belfast looked into Smith's Wine Vaults and there was an acrimonious debate which had glasses clinking nervously on the bar. According to Paisley Cromwell's actions had been "reprisals" for the massacres of 1641 when thousands of Anglo-Scottish Protestant settlers had been slaughtered).
You might think that someone like Jim Smith would be inclined to empathise with the plight of other peoples who have been subjected to the torments of colonial domination. But it never seems to work like that. The downtrodden get akick out of keeping others who are downtrodden downtrodden.
"Pass over the race page and pipe down!" said the old man in the Empire Bar after Jim Smith's talk about his inner city neighbours had taken a turn for the worse. "Or I will put a pound on that horse called Oliver Cromwell!"

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.

You can always tell when election day is approaching in Twiverton. The front of the Swileys' prefab will be plastered with 'Vote Labour!' posters. At the last general election of 1959 the Swileys even had a 'Vote Labour!' poster nailed up on their coalhouse door and another one glued to their water-butt. How many they had pasted up in the sitting room and on the front of their parrot's cage is anyone's guess.
There have been four general elections since we first moved into the prefabs, and the Conservative Party has won three of them - the last three on the trot. "Which is one in the eye for the Trots!" says Dai 'Tolstoy' Lectic with a mischievous wink. (Someone should tell the newly arrived resident of prefab number three that his mischievous winks are being completely wasted. No one else on the prefab estate has even heard of Leon Trotsky).
Twiverton is a reddish hued Labour enclave on the western industrial side of Tory Bath. It has been solid Labour Party territory for years, although the odds on it staying this way are shortening by the day. The 'Vote Labour!' posters that periodically blaze out of the Swileys' prefab act like political acid in dissolving old affiliations and loyalties and reconfiguring others. Their twin effect is to give Labour voting a bad name and encourage passers-by to take a more sympathetic look at the qualities of the other parties' candidates. At the last local elections these wee the formidable Mr Edgar Pearce (resident of Camelot Green, President of the Bath Dickens Society and Liberal Party candidate), Edna Browning - soon-to-be-knighted expert on trade union affairs who has moved here from her council house in Tottenham (the ConservativeParty candidate), and Gilbert Youth (the World Government candidate who - win or lose - will continue to hold mild and bitter constituency surgeries in his base in the My Full Moon public house).
A thumb-nail sketch of Twiverton published in The Worker's Voice on the eve of the General Strike of 1926 described it as "a linchpin of the 'proletarian red belt' of north-east Somerset, a hard-edged terrain despite its soft water which includes coal mines, a wool mill, a major crane manufacturing company, and the terraced house retreats of stone masons, cabinet makers and oppressed solicitors' clerks." Romantics on the political left have long regarded Twiverton as almost mythic territory in which echoes from a distant Chartist, Luddite and Leveller past (and perhaps a Muggletonian one as well) can still be heard today. It is only after they come here on a visit and see the Swileys' prefab with its startling array of 'Vote Labour!' posters that they are liable to succumb to dark thoughts about socialist ideas being hopelessly enmeshed with quasi-messianic and utopian fantasies.
It would be pushing it too far to say that the crucial factor behind the Conservative Party's electoral success in 1951, 1955 and 1959 has been the Swileys. That said every council estate in the country is likely to have its Swileys. Die-hard Labour voters have been known to walk by the Swileys' prefab at number twenty-five, stare in disbelief at the forest of 'Vote Labour!' posters and the chaos in the front garden, and arrive at the polling station muttering "Any party but Labour!" No wonder Ray 'Short-Back-And-Sides' - Twiverton's indefatigable Labour Party candidate - has expressly forbidden anyone in his campaign team from giving the Swileys a 'Vote Labour!' poster. This has proved to be of no avail as Conservative Central Office keeps a special watch on the Swileys' prefab. If there are less than two posters on display a phone call is made to Labour Party HQ to demand that a fresh batch of 'VoteLabour!' posyers be swiftly dispatched to the Swileys' address.
Howarth Potter (the recently appointed pipe-smoking agent of the Twiverton Constituency Labour Party and author of 'Must Labour Go On Losing?' argues that the Swileys symbolise "the central strategic dilemma" facing the party's future. His starting point is Ernest Bevin's comment that the British working-class suffers from a "poverty of aspirations." This, he insists, is no longer the case. Since the late nineteen fifties the country has become choc-a-bloc with three-piece suites, Formica tables, record players, Do-It-Yourself stores, and television aerials. There is even some talk of people going on holiday in Spain. While rationing ended in 1954 Howarth Potter believes that a "rationing of the mind" continues to shape Labour Party thinking and philosophy. On his very first visit to our prefab estate the new party agent was introduced to members of the slick salesman's family who live in immaculate prefab number forty-six on the corner of Woodhedge Road. Not only do they have a television set, a Ford popular motor car, and a son at the grammar school -they have a telephone as well! Asked whether they would be supporting Labour in the forthcoming local elections the slick salesman replied - somewhat ominously - "It all depends." Then he added in a hushed voice: "Keep this to yourself, but we are floating voters."
Meeting the slick salesman's family was to have a potent impact on Twiverton's new Labour Party agent. The following year he convened a special meeting of the North-East Somerset Labour Party and urged members to "leave their 'rationing mind-set' behind and appeal to the upward thrusting, spic and span, ultra-ambitious and aspiring section of the new working-class. To voters who will float towards us if we have an attractive party image. To voters like the slick salesman who lives in prefab number forty-six."
A shocked silence followed and Councillor Short-Back-And-Sides', leader of Twiverton's Labour group, rose to speak. "What the party agent has said is all very well. But I cannot see how his spic and span/upward thrusting/aspiring strategy is going to appeal to our core supporters."
A shout then went up from the back of the hall. "Councillor 'Short-Back-And-Sides' has hit the nail on the head. Where will the new spic and span/upwardly thrusting/aspiring strategy leave the people who voted for us come rain or shine? And where on earth will it leave the Swileys!"