She said “Try me!”

They felt that the British would roll over and give up, be discouraged. But that wasn’t the way, that wasn’t the way it happened. The British were just the opposite of being discouraged. They armed everybody, all the civilians, with guns. The English have always been great for guns anyway, shotguns, and they issued everyone with a shotgun if they could have it, or at least with ammunition. I remember my aunt, I had an aunt who was a nurse. She had a shotgun, a double barrel and she was given two boxes of ammunition - BB’s, that’s for shooting deer. Very good for shooting people. There were posters stuck up everywhere. I remember one excellent poster, it had, this was the time when the Germans were massing their troops on the coast. One poster had a good looking girl leaning against a building and she had a shotgun cradled and she had a look on her face. She said, it had, “Try me!” you know. The sign said, “Shoot to Kill.” That’s the way they behaved. So they defended their country properly and the Germans never came close to invading England, they gave up. Then they reverted to bombing the British cities and they deliberately attacked London. I was in London at that time. We used to go from Portsmouth to London to go to the theatres. I mean, the British never closed down their theatres. You know, everyone would scramble for air raids, air raid shelters, which they ... the tube stations were used for those. But young people, people like me, you know, we didn’t pay too much attention to air raid sirens. You’d try to find a pub that was open. But I remember the word going around after one raid on the east end of London, 8,000 people were killed in one night. People being killed doesn’t really affect you unless you happen to know them, so I’ve discovered. It’s fairly impersonal, you know. I guess you get, after a while you get used to having people killed and you don’t stew about it. I mean, you can tie yourself up in knots looking at some corpse and say, how about his mother and his sister and all that stuff. But really, at least when you’re young, you don’t pay attention to that.