39

Local life.

Borgentreich and its surrounding villages were truly rural in character. There was no industry except that derived from the land. It was inevitable that, living in an RAF camp in such a location, I had the opportunity to observe a very austere, almost medieval, way of life.
Strip farming was the norm for most people, there being very few integral areas of land under single ownership. The strips were scattered and one farmer may have three or four such narrow strips of arable land in different locations. The countryside was open, with no hedges and little protection from wind. Except in the small forests and villages there were few trees. Most roads, however, were treelined to provide shade and protection for horse traffic. The number of cars was minimal.
The local soil was rich loess which, given added manure, was very productive. In season, I have seen farmers spreading basic slag by hand - an extremely arduous and filthy task.1 Both liquid manure and the more solid variety - often containing human waste (distinctive by its smell) - was spread by horse-drawn slurry barrels and discharged from a tap at the rear, or by open cart and handspread with forks.
Ploughing was done using a pair of yoked oxen, or two horses if the farmer was wealthy enough. I have also seen a horse and a milch cow hitched together pulling a laden, wooden, taper-sided, open cart. I think the worst situation I ever witnessed was an old farmer guiding a plough while his entire family, small children and all, pulled it up and down their little strip of land.
Corn was usually sown by hand and was harvested with sickles and scythes in biblical fashion. Beet, mangel-wurzels, and kale were hand-sown in drills. From my window in the Mess I have watched women, mostly in long black clothes and white or grey headscarves, spending days on end doing this backbreaking task. Later, when the seedlings were big enough, they were thinned, some being transplanted to fill any gaps in the rows. This was done on hands and knees. Periodically, I saw the same women going up and down these rows pulling out the weeds. The distress these people suffered when heavy rain washed away the soil, or strong dry winds blew it about as dust, is almost unimaginable.
Hay, cut with sickles and scythes from roadside verges and land which was too steep to till, was carted and stored in lofts running along the entire length of the farmhouse buildings. The beet, also harvested by hand, was carted home and tipped down chutes into the cellars of the same buildings. The animals were kept in byres adjacent to the living accommodation. Poultry, including flocks of aggressive geese, were similarly housed. In this way both animals and humans, with their shared warmth under a top lagging of hay, were kept protected from the extremes of winter.
I was invited into one such house for a cup of coffee, the farmer and his wife, Herr und Frau Konze having previously been invited to a Guest Night in our Mess. I was ushered into the kitchen (there was no other downstairs room that I saw), and invited to sit on a hard upright chair at a bare wooden, scrubbed-top table. There were no easy chairs. There were dressers and cupboards round the walls, and ornaments and papers on shelves. A bare electric lamp hung from the centre of the ceiling and another lamp was on a dresser. A new radio stood alongside a vase of dried flowers on a windowsill. The room was heated by an enclosed, tiled stove, its
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1 Basic slag, used as a fertiliser, is an extremely heavy and dirty by-product of iron smelting. 203