It is odd how these jaunty little airs sang themselves into our hearts and heads over there. I was never musical so I learnt to love them all. Play ‘If You Were The Only Girl in the World’ and I see nothing but a crowded hut and the men all clamouring for tea and Twist. Or ‘Blue Eyes, Blue Eyes, Sweetest I Ever Saw’ bring back rows of khaki at unforgettable concerts. And when the hours are slow, I have only to hear the barrel organ stammer out ‘K-K-K-Katy’ to sweep away the years between and see me back in an old French street with the Army on either side. But there is one song I hope I shall never hear again - ‘Roses of Picardy’. These are France and all France - they go with the English bugles blowing over the mud of Martin-Église where the Demob camp was - they go with the streets of Arras as I walked down them one March morning and English voices sang snatches from the windows, ‘Roses are blooming in Picardy, But there’s never a rose like you’- and they go with Thiepval Wood at three o’clock in the morning and the Battery Major who asked me to marry him there and then. No - ‘Roses of Picardy’ are too redolent of France and carry too many memories and too much pain for me. There’s another song too that always brings back demobbing time.... [A]t the big Demob camp...troops only stayed three days to be washed, fitted out with clean clothes and made respectable for England. It was the wildest three days of their lives.There was nothing they would not say or do; they were clean daft with joy.... [W]e heard the snatches of the song that we delighted to hear: Hullo! Hullo! Hullo! It’s an English girl again, English eyes, English nose, English hair and English clothes. Hullo! Hullo! Hullo! to me it’s very plain, The days of the war are over It’s an English girl again. Sometimes they sang it, sometimes they whistled it, sometimes they hummed it, but they wouldn’t have been demobbing troops without it. << less