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A sergeant pilot behind us leaned forward. "That's all right, cock," he said, "they gave it to Mr. Hitler too."

To put Britain into a twentieth-century perspective, we must go beyond the Britain many Americans know best: the Merrie England created by literature, the stage, and the movies. This picturesque rural England has not been a true picture of the country for over a century. But the guidebooks and the British Travel Association still send tourists to its shrines, novelists still write charmingly dated pictures of its life, and on both sides of the Atlantic the movies and the stage continue to present attractive but false pictures of "Olde Worlde" England.

The British of today know it is dead. They retain an unabashed yearning for its tranquillity, but the young cynics are hacking at this false front. One morning recently I was cheered to note the advent of a new coffee bar, the "Hey, Calypso," in the self-consciously Elizabethan streets of Stratford-on-Avon. I am sure this would have delighted the Bard, himself never above borrowing a bit of foreign color. And the garish sign corrected the phony ostentation of "Elizabethan" Stratford.