I do not know when I first heard this well known twentieth-century folk-song by Ewan MacColl but I learned it from Wilfried Drygala when we took this song into the Idle Fellows repertoire. It is extremely well-known in Germany, even among the quite young, and I'm often asked to perform it.
I quite like the song and I find it very poetic and the words certainly match my youth as a young R.N. Greenie in Portsmouth in the late fifties and early sixties. A lot of kissing by factory walls, dockyard walls or indeed any kind of wall went on in those days. I don't know if it still goes on in UK I've never seen that kind of behaviour by German youth at any period of time.

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