A queens-eye view of WW II bombing

LONDON, Sept. 13 (UPI) -- A letter from the late Queen Elizabeth of Britain describing the bombing of Buckingham Palace was released Saturday.

The letter gives a rare private glimpse of a woman who lived her life in public but gave only one press interview, when her engagement to the future King George VI was announced, The Guardian reported. The queen died in 2002 at the age of 101, outliving her husband by half a century.

Elizabeth told Queen Mary, her mother-in-law, she was trying to get an eyelash out of her husband's eye when they heard a German plane overhead. The letter was written the same day, Sept. 12, 1940.

"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.

She also described a visit later that day to a bombed area in the East End of London.

"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," she said.

A biography of the Queen Mother, by the well-known journalist William Shawcross, is to be published next week. Shawcross, a friend of Prince Charles, was given access to her letters.