The late queen Elizabeth the queen mother revealed in a letter published yesterday how she and her husband king George VI came close to being killed during World War II in a German bombing raid.
Written hours after the incident, the letter tells how the royal couple leapt when they heard the “unmistakable whirr-whirr of a German plane” and then the “scream of a bomb” 69 years ago.
The bomb exploded in the grounds of Buckingham Palace and three servants were injured in the attack, the queen wrote to her mother-in-law.
“My darling Mama. I hardly know how to begin to tell you of the horrible attack on Buckingham Palace this morning,” the letter says. “It all happened so quickly, that we had only time to look foolishly at each other, when the scream hurtled past us, and exploded with a tremendous crash in the quadrangle,” she wrote, adding that her “knees trembled a little bit.”
“I saw a great column of smoke and earth thrown up into the air, and then we all ducked like lightning into the corridor,” said the queen, the mother of Britain’s current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.
“There was another tremendous explosion and we and our two pages who were outside the door, remained for a moment or two in the corridor away from the staircase, in case of flying glass,” the letter said.
Hours later, after lunching in their air-raid shelter, she visited London’s east end and wrote: “I felt as if I was walking in a dead city ... all the houses evacuated and yet through the broken windows one saw all the poor little possessions, photographs, beds, just as they were left.”
The king and queen refused to leave Britain during the war, against Foreign Office advice, a move that won them affection across the country.
The letter, dated Sept. 13, 1940, and published in several British newspapers yesterday, was released by Buckingham Palace ahead of the publication this week of the first official biography of queen Elizabeth.
Praised for her stoicism during the war, she remained a cherished figure for many as the queen mother, or “Queen Mum.”
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