The rainbow never sets

"I have asked the accountant of Hardt, Pocorny & Co. to pay you a monthly allowance of DM100 per month. Will that be enough?"

"Yes, that is fine, thank you very much Onkel Rudolf." "Well, if you would like to say hello to the Forstmanns, I'll show you a shortcut through the house. Oh, and tomorrow you will be our guest. Tante Marie and I want to go to the Aggertal. We'll show you a bit of our beautiful Bergisches Land. Would you like to come?"

"Very much so, thank you." I was overwhelmed. So much kindness and the feeling of being part of the family. I knew I would be happy here. The Forstmanns were also happy to welcome me, and invited me straight away to come for the meals over the weekend.

On 17 April I met the factory manager at Hardt Pocorny & Co. He had already prepared a roster for me. He stressed that I had to go through all the different branches of the factory, without missing one, so that I'd get a complete overview of things. I started at the design office. Hardt Pocorny & Co was producing mainly knitting wool under the name of 'Ilse Wolle'. The designers had to be up to date with the latest fashion, or rather they had to be ahead, to produce wool which customers would want to buy in about six months time. Onkel Wilhelm had anticipated a boom in knitting wool, as television had recently been introduced into Germany. His theory was that the women folk would sit and watch TV and have plenty of time to knit at the same time. I do not know whether his forecast ever came true.

The designer gave me a finished piece of worsted yarn and asked me to analyse it according to the colour mix and the proportion of each colour. It was almost like forensic work, painstaking and detailed, sorting out each colour component, but I enjoyed it.

After a week I went to the dye-house where mostly tops, the combed wool slivers, or sometimes the ready yarns, were dyed. It was quite a complicated procedure, as the dyes had to be fixed with heat and then cooled off and rinsed so that the colours would not run. I also learnt here that the firm had prepared a holding weir for their dirty water that came out of the factory, mainly from the dye-house, before it was released back into the Wupper. As there were so many manufacturers dependent on clean water further down stream, no one could afford to pollute the water for their neighbours.

The tops came on to a mixing machine after they had been dyed. Different colours of wool tops were brought together through a combing machine, according to pre-set proportions. I remembered my work at the designer's office and understood what this section was on about. At the same time the top sliver was reduced to about half its previous thickness, and on another machine it was stretched again and then spooled onto bobbins, which would then go on the actual spinning machine.

Each spinning machine could hold about 20 to 30 bobbins, which had

236