The rainbow never sets

"Well, now you know." Helmut was intrigued to hear that the milk driver had to do errands for Mutter or Oma occasionally. For him, shopping was just round the corner. We had to get our cheese and butter from the factory.

"One day we received a large piece of 'blue cheese'. The manager of the factory told us, a customer of theirs had returned the cheese complaining it had gone mouldy already. Well, I tell you, we didn't mind. I love 'blue cheese', don't you, Helmut?"

"No, I don't like it." "We all do, especially now that cheese is rationed, to get an extra portion was really good. I must tell you another story which is linked with the milk cart going daily to Posen. When my sister Gerda was born in December 1937, I couldn't understand why it took so long for her to get home. I suggested that she could be picked up by the milk-driver and brought home on the milk-cart. I was very disappointed when she wasn't among the other parcels."

"That was rather dumb." "I was only nine then." After the cow-shed we came to the horse stables. We had over fifty work horses. Each horseman or fornal in Polish, had to look after four horses, feed them, clean them, and then work with them (depending on the season, either ploughing, pulling the harvesters, or pulling the carts). When they worked with just two horses, someone else 'borrowed' the other two.

When Helmut saw some name plaques above the mangers, he wanted to know if that meant anything. I told him that Günter and I had given each horse a name. Günter had worked out a system whereby we could tell the age of each horse. The oldest horses got a name starting with the letter 'A', then 'B' and so on. The youngest were now starting with the letter 'P', like the three-year-old 'Pollux'. Then I had to explain to him how the fornals were good at telling the age of a horse, by just looking at their teeth. The older they are, the shorter they get.

"But what's the point of all this?" "When harvest time comes, we help in the field and earn ourselves some pocket money. The foreman tells us the name of the horse which we are to take. It usually is an old one, very docile. We wouldn't be allowed to take a young one."

Then I showed him how we harnessed a horse to a rake in the shed. Just one horse per rake. There were usually two or three rakes required at harvest time. Günter would take one, I would take another, and if Hans was around, (Günter's school friend), he would take the third. The rakes were about three meters wide, so when we sat on one going to a field we had to be careful not to bump into anything. In the field, the corn had been cut and the bundles were all put into neat rows of stacks. We had to rake between these stacks. Whenever the rake was full, the driver had to

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