Farmers in the Revenue Office

(1931)

When a townie, a trader, a craftsman, or (as we like to say) an entrepreneur has a problem with the Revenue, then he sits himself down and writes his declaration or his petition or his complaint − at any rate he writes something. Farmers have never been great ones for writing, though, and the proliferation of authorities during the 14–18 War and after has done little to cure them of their aversion. I had a boss in the country once, a very respectable landowner and quite literate, who issued a strong edict against taking up a pen on a Friday. ‘Writing is the source of all evil,’ he would proclaim. ‘Did you ever meet anyone who did well from writing on a Friday?’ I couldn’t say I had. ‘You see!’ he crowed and, just in case, locked up the ink bottle and typewriter. ‘Time was, it was only labourers that wrote.’

This landowner received a visit from a Revenue official who wanted to repay some excess tax. (These things do happen, it was long ago.) But it was a Friday, and it wasn’t possible to get anyone to sign anything. Saturday was pay day, and the Revenue office was a long way away, money was short, but a signature – absolutely not! ‘If I were you, I’d get off my land sharpish,’ said my boss menacingly. ‘You’ve got a nasty pencil thingummy behind your ear, and it makes me ill to so much as look at it. I don’t think any good will come of that.’

There are two worlds, and when they collide you get fire and brimstone. And things don’t always pass off so smoothly as on this next occasion, when the lord of a hundred acres sold his motor plough, bought during the Inflation. He had put an ad for it in the local rag, the motor plough was sold, the money went where last year’s snow goes, and then there was a letter from the Revenue (which is an avid reader of the local press): ‘We note there is no mention in your annual accounts of proceeds from the sale of the advertised motor plough, etc. etc.’ – ‘Put it with the other stuff,’ said my boss. I put it on what he was pleased to call the dung heap. Time passed, and a further letter came from the Revenue: ‘1. We ask you for immediate response to our query of the nth inst. regarding tax due on the sale of your motor plough. 2. In case of deferral, we request reasons.’ – ‘Just write this,’ said my boss: ‘To the Tax Office in Altholm. Firstly. I have never owned a steam plough. Secondly, see firstly. Yours faithfully …’ The Revenue didn’t get in touch again.

But these teasing arabesques are in a minority: the man was a landowner and had a sense of humour; more usually when a small farmer sees the official letterhead, he panics. Total incompetents proceed like the Rügen farmer who drove up with a load of cabbages – took them down ten miles of rough track too, wouldn’t you know it – and offered to pay his taxes in kind, in the form of his cabbages. ‘The wholesaler offers me sixty pfennigs, but the local paper says the official rate is one-ten. You’re not telling me you’re not official!’ The taxman can talk with the tongue of an angel, but the farmer won’t get his head around it. The man sat there in the Revenue office, and every half-hour or so he heaved a sigh and improved his offer. By the time the office closed, he was down to sixty-five pfennigs. It was a fair price and they were excellent cabbages, but no one would play ball and he was baffled – baffled and furious.

Another story comes to mind – this from the time of the Inflation – of a landowner buying his wife a silver fox. Unfortunately his book-keeper had entered the acquisition under ‘livestock’. Then when the time came for doing the inventory, they were an animal short in the stables. It had to be there, it was down on paper as an acquisition, and the owner was suspected of having sold the horse cash down – till the silver fox came out of the wardrobe and the receipt was produced from the file.

Today’s farmers don’t have it easy, not at all, but I almost think the bailiffs have a harder time of it. I’m not thinking about overwork, and making your way from farm to farm over rough tracks, and negotiating the savage dogs, the hostile faces, the muttered threats. He’s just a public official, he doesn’t set the taxes he has to collect, he doesn’t know how they’re calculated and why they are calculated as they are. All he has to do is seize and impound. And in the end, to auction off.

I once attended an auction like that, and I’ll never forget it. It was a tiny farm, just about fifty acres, and a lot of bidders had come out. There was the auctioneer, and there were his assistants, and everything was all set to begin. But there was a group of farmers standing in the corner, not so very many, but it was probably the entire village. They stood there quietly, some way off, on a little rise. The first lot was called, it was a cart. And the first bid was called. And in the same moment as the little crofter, ten villages away, called out his ‘Twenty marks’ there was a sort of grumble, or groan, like a distant roll of thunder. The farmers stood there quite still, they didn’t move their lips, and you can groan without opening your mouth.

There were rural constables on the farm, there were many more bidders and interested parties than farmers, and there were in fact two or three more shy bids, but after a while there weren’t any more. The cart was knocked down, just for the sake of a price having been achieved, but the successful bidder had suddenly disappeared, vanished, not there. The auction was a failure. The farm was of course sold after all, the stock was shipped out here and there to other areas, and the mortgage-holder was left owning the farm.

But I can still see the farmers standing there, grumbling with mouths closed.

I think of this as an ongoing war as I write this, and whenever it comes to be read. It isn’t easy to lose a farm that has been in the family for generations, nor is it easy to drive someone away from such a farm when they haven’t done anything. Both are difficult, and if you’re asked whose fault it is – always the question, who’s really to blame? – then you can only answer in the words of Theodor Fontane, ‘well, that’s a wide field’.