Very few things are as traumatic as the taxman’s knock on the taxpayer’s door. Usually the ‘strike time’ is earlier than the milkman and newspaper boy. At that hour, the household is just stirring into wakefulness. The children are being woken up, the servant has tea on the boil, the residents are still in their nightdress, many of them still asleep.
Into this domestic idyll, swoop a swarm of taxmen and their police escort, making their way, going from room to room, waking up the unsuspecting who are relishing their last bit of sleep, hustling them to the drawing room, locking all the rooms. These would later be scanned with a fine toothed comb.
Even the most hardened tax evader, who knows that eventually he may play host to the tax team and thinks he is mentally prepared, gets a brutal shock. But most evaders are not hardened, and the experience can be life-changing. The hours and days that follow the dawn attack see the tax team go through the entire house, room by room, cupboard by cupboard, suitcase by suitcase; nothing is off-limits.