Temporary parts of our heritage that deserve to preserved

enough to make you spell the word paraffin right when you think about

it. Prefabs. There was a path leading up to the prefab where we lived in

Cathcart, a quiet, douce, wee suburb, almost a village, of Glasgow.

Up the road were the big houses with striped sunblinds and bowls of

fruit in the hall: the dads in there were businessmen, the girls went to

Dairsie House nursery school down the road and then off to Craigholme

School for Girls. Where the boys went I didn't care but it was Hutchie

and Allan Glen's anyway, as I found out later. Across the road lived Mrs

Ramsay, in a big, well-set tenement. Mrs Ramsay had an iron range but

also a bath and an inside lavatory, one for herself like.

So did the prefabs. Two bedrooms, for heaven's sake, and a kitchen.

There was, and this was 1948, a refrigerator. Stick a living room on to

it and it was bloody luxury, as the comedians would have it. And it was

too. Prefab owners were more than lucky. Many of them were lucky enough

to be ex-servicemen but they had to be, like my father, regular

soldiers: they got the extra points. And to live in a prefab needed

extra points.

For after the Second World War there was a housing need which could

not be met by the then Labour Government. One of the solutions was

temporary housing. One of the temporary housing solutions was

prefabricated houses. They were meant to last for ten years; a bit like

mobile homes. The lucky ones got prefabs.

Built of asbestos and alumunium -- the early ones were of asbestos,

later of Gralluminium, (an alloy near indestructible) -- the prefabs had

all the disadvantages of houses which were intended to be demolished

before a family had grown up. Yet families grew up in them and how. When

my father's job took him into Glasgow's Townhead, I left this leafy and

rather sleepy little village for the Dicken's bloody blacking factory. I

dreamed for years of going back to the prefab with its paraffin heater

and its front and back garden. The back garden was huge and my dad grew

potatoes there. He made friends with the business fellows up in the big

houses who grew potatoes next to his garden.

The prefabs were more than temporary housing: they represented a

dreadful stasis in which councils, housing policies, the lucky, lucky

people who got the prefabs in the first place, could congratulate the

very luck of getting houses which, no matter how sub-standard, were

houses. Yet they also represented the New World We Were Building and

they did too. Mr Bought House -- Mr Nicol, a chap with a tailor's

business -- found himself, after the war, with a curious empathy to my

own father, who had been many years fighting.

The last prefabs are still here, in Glasgow; the South-side.

Hangingshaw; just where the periphery of Hampden thinks itself to be.

They are neat and well-kept. The gardens are those which middle-aged

people like myself remember the way railway stations being: clean and

neat and not very imaginative; what of that?

The district council wants to bring these old houses down, like

telling Vera Lynn it is time to lie down and die, like saying homes fit

for heroes should be peripheral estates with drug fiends next door and

wee lassies with babies and drunken boyfriends downstairs. Like . . .

well, not like the prefabs of Hangingshaw, the last prefabs damn near in

Britain. The council says that renovation of the 52 houses in this quiet

little offshoot of Glasgow's Prospecthill Road would cost #1.5m. It is

still less than it will cost to rehouse these tenants -- and not all of

them are tenants, for seven of the houses have been bought by their

long-time residents.

The prefabs are clearly yet liveable and the area most certainly is.

Where the decantment would put these people one does not know but they

are not likely to get homes in the nice housing schemes, the Mossparks,

the Knightswoods, the Merrylees. Rose and Danny Traynor, pensioners both

like 90% of the Hanginshaw prefab people, came from Castlemilk, one of

those dreadful experiments of housing estates, and bought their lovely

little prefab for #8000. They will lose their house if the council's

decision stands. They cannot afford the private market. They will be

back to Castlemilk if this Labour council has its way.

Mary Valente has been eight years in Hangingshaw, came from what was

once one of the better schemes, Toryglen. Her prefab is luxurious, with

the kind of sybaritic touch which decent working-class people aspire to

-- thick, rich carpeting, bookshelves groaning under the strain of

Children's British Encyclopaedias, the sign of aspiration. She wants to

stay here but adds that she'd like to see more young people moving in.

There are only six children in this little enclave.

This was echoed by Frank Hamill, who has lived in Hangingshaw for 40

years and whose children have all gone on to further education and good

jobs. This area has produced steady young people who are now steady

middle-aged people with children who are equally so. It is quiet and

bourgeois indeed but it is also working class -- what that generation

who saw out a war fought for. There are no knife carriers in

Hangingshaw. There is no vandalism. You should see the glory of the

little gardens. But the council has decided to bin the prefabs rather

than the knives.

Tory Councillor Norman Mortimer has been trying his best to save the

prefabs and the community which it houses. It is a dreadful irony that

it takes a Tory to represent the interests of the old soldiers and their

wives who voted for a Labour government in 1945. Not really, for I know

Labour councillors well, and indeed I know the redoubtable Norman

Mortimer too. Norman is an ex-Olympic fencer and an eccentric of the

highest order. One of his eccentricities is a belief in good solid

community life, able to argue against the arrogance of bureaucracy.

Norman is for the People, the wee soul.

But there is more to Mortimer's argument than the sheer desire to

stand by this beleagueredcommunity. The prefabs themselves are a

testament to the will to make life better for us all after the horrors

of the last war. In truth, these last prefabs should be preserved

anyway, even as listed buildings, part of our heritage which the last 14

years has seen fit to erode.

There was a path leading up to the prefab where we lived in Cathcart.

There was a path leading out of it too, and it led to other worlds. And,

yes, the prefabs were horribly hot in the summer and bloody freezing in

the winter. But they were warm all the year round.