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 by the Queen Mother, hours after the incident.

The Sunday Times reported that in the letter to 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 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, hours after the bombing raid on September 13, 1940.