Exiting webview without redraw

I have got a Webview object without a background, so I can render text using the power of HTML over my background of choice. It’s looking great, except that I want to be able to close the webview without causing it to load. 

When the webview loads, the entire view on my iPhone 4 flashes grey, which ruins the effect. This seems to happen on both a link click and on a form submit, which are the usual choices I use to send a message to the code outside to close the listener.

Is there anyway to disable the refresh colour or get a message from the webview out without causing the HTML renderer to do a redraw?