Within a couple of months of being put on the Derro Company payroll the old man was informed by the authorities that - as he was now working on the Continent for more than six months a year -he had ceased to be classed as a 'domiciled' resident of the United Kingdom. He was now a 'non-dom' and not officially resident in the UK for tax-paying purposes. And that was official!
Some people are born into'non-dom'status, some people achieve 'non-dom' status, and some people have 'non-dom' status thrust upon them. The days of being a bona fide payer of UK income tax were over kaput, finito, and up the creek. He could pay as much income tax as he liked to the tax collectors of Italy (are there any?) but the UK tax collectors wanted nothing to do with him. There was no point in him pacing up and down in the back yard and calling out "to be or not to be?" The tax man had given him the definitive answer.
In the 1950s not having to pay income tax meant that a household's pockets grew by a full eight per cent deeper! (Even after paying for the self-employed national insurance stamp you were quids in.)
You might think this was good news, but au contraire! The exclusion of the old man from the ranks of the income tax paying masses was a complete pain in the neck! Our peace of mind was knocked for six. We should have chained ourselves to the railings outside the tax inspector's office and held up our Let Us Pay Income Tax Like Everyone Else! placards.
Those who do not pay income tax are not fully paid-up citizens. Only those who have been lived in the shadows of Non-Dom-Ville are able to comprehend this truth. States which push their tax extraction powers too far give their income tax paying masses the glorious right to rebel. They can write glorious stories on the picture book of history. History would have been a damp squib if everyone had been a non-dom. There would be no Magna Carta, no Declaration of Independence, no idea of the 'The Rights of Man'. The tax authorities deprived the old man of his inalienable right to be a revolting peasant.
A nagging fear lurks in the shadowy recesses of our prefab an official letter from the Inland Revenue is going to land - and land with one almighty plop - on our front door mat. It will tell us there has been a minor slip-up, an administrative error, and the old man has in fact been liable to pay income tax after all! "So send us your cheque for twelve thousand pounds, twelve shillings and twelvepence halfpenny to us pronto. And we mean pronto!"
If the State does end up chasing us up for any income tax arrears we will have a Plan B in place. There are plenty of Continental bolt-holes to head for. Stamped on each page of the old man's cement-smeared passport are scores of names of ports of entry and border control stations: Indrejst aen, Chiasso, Kon Marchaussee, Halsingborg... Any of these could be our escape destination. We will catch an early train at Bath Spa station, head for the key junction of Mangotsfield (this will give off a false scent of our heading for the Midlands, Holyhead, and Ireland), and then turn east, board the boat train at Harwich under the cover of night, and then find an income tax paying job somewhere.