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This story is taken from an interview with Robin Collins at the Royal British legion, Bangor, and has been added to the site with their permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interviewer was Anita Cochrane, transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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My grandfather lived on Blythe street, off Sandy Row. And there was a Landmine fell on Blythe street.

I was about 6 or 7 at the time. My father brought me down, my uncle - My grandfather that lived in the house had to go to hospital, and he was up in the Throne hospital. The thing that sticks in my mind is that my father brought me down to see Blythe street. Now, Blythe street wasn’t particularly badly damaged. It only got blast. But the thing that sticks in my mind is that … Can you imagine a row of houses with the fronts all blown off them? Blast! And you stood back and you looked up and all you could see was the wee bedrooms with the Chest of drawers and the beds and the tallboys and that, the whole way along. And that really intrigued me. Being able to stand as you do … I looked along. And I thought to myself, This was really quite unusual. To see the whole fronts of houses blown to bits.

[All different colours]

and another thing, too. Whenever the siren went, my mother’s neighbours on either side and a couple of others - on Richview Street, off the Donegal road - and … You could hear the planes overhead, and I remember they dropped a bomb or something.
The house shook, and all the damage that really we had was a couple of cups fell off. and it crashed! You thought the whole house was coming down, but it was only them falling on the tiled floor.
The silly thing about it was, when the neighbours came in, they all sat. Mum had made them all tea. It was like a wee social gathering. If a bomb had of fell on our house, it would have wiped out all the ones in our row.
Of course, being small I was put under the table. As if that would help. But Mother felt very very ... Because I was under the table, I was secure.

[did you not have shelters?]
The shelters were abused. The shelters on the street. But the shelters … There was dance hall at the top of our street, Richview dance hall. It was frequented by the Americans. Usually the Americans took the Girls for a kafuffle into the airraid shelters. I don’t know how the devil we would have got into them!

I remember going down the High Street into Belfast and seeing the devastation on High Street. and there was a big water tank down there, a Static water tank.
It was completely … devastated. And then there was these sideshows down there. And there was guys doing Strongman tricks. There was this guy who always came down, they put a block on his chest, and somebody came down with a Sledgehammer like he was that strong. It was like a sideshow down there.

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