JOIN USEx-British Royal couple 'almost got killed during WW II'
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I and her husband King George VI almost got killed in a German aerial raid during World War II, revealed a letter penned by the Queen Mother, hours after the incident.
In the letter to her mother-in-law Queen Mary, the late Queen Mother wrote about the “unmistakable whirr-whirr of a German plane” which frightened the couple before it carried a bombing attack on her “dear old BP” (Buckingham Palace).
“We heard the unmistakable whirr-whirr of a German plane. We said ‘ah, a German’, and before anything else could be said, there was the noise of aircraft diving at great speed and then the scream of a bomb.
“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.
“My knees trembled a little bit for a minute or two after the explosions! But we both feel quite well today,” the Queen Mother wrote to Queen Mary, some hours after the bombing attack on September 13, 1940.
Even among the carnage and aftermath of the attack, as the Queen Mother picked her way through the rubble, there was a glimpse of the humour people believed they could detect behind her smiling public face, The Sunday Times reported.
“I found the chef hustling about, and when I asked him if he was all right, he replied cheerfully that there had been ‘un petit quelque chose dans le coin, un petit fruit’, with a broad smile.
“The petit quelque chose was the bomb on the chapel next door! He’s perfectly unmoved and took the opportunity to tell me of his unshakeable conviction that France will rise again!” the letter to Queen Mary said.
Buckingham Palace has released the letter of Queen Mother, the mother of Britain’s current Monarch Elizabeth II, ahead of the publication of the official biography of Queen Elizabeth I.