During the last two years of the war I had begged Aunt Fanny for a plot of my own. I only planted tomatoes there. Every time a horse-drawn cart came up Bahnhofstrasse, I rushed out onto the street armed with a bucket and shovel to sweep up the horse droppings. As a result, I certainly had the best-tended tomato plants in all of Sonneberg, with the result that the little plants perished miserably from all the manure.
