Star of Channel 4's Gogglebox, Mary Killen has opened up on the trauma of growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
Mary, who grew up in Larne, now lives in Wiltshire with her husband and fellow Gogglebox star Giles Wood and joined the show during series 5 in 2015.
Sitting down on LBC's Difficult Women podcast with her friend and sister of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Rachel Johnson, whom Mary credits for getting her on to the cast of Gogglebox, she spoke frankly about her childhood in Northern Ireland.
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“I grew up in Northern Ireland where it was dangerous and then I came to London and I met dodgy people," she told Johnson.
“So I have a heightened awareness of risk.
“It was all absolutely blissful until the Troubles started and then the evening news broadcast was terrorising because it would be a man has been shot dead while washing up at his kitchen sink today. Police say it was a case of mistaken identity. That kind of thing.
“Plus you couldn’t park. You couldn’t leave a car in a shopping street unless somebody else was sitting in it in case you had left a car bomb.”
When asked how she first became aware of the Troubles going on around her, Killen recalled her alarm at seeing masked men marching through the streets of Larne during the Ulster Workers Council strikes.
"Our town wasn’t quite so badly affected," she said.
"But there was still every so often there was one night when they had a power strike and all the power workers marched through the town in the dark with masks on.
“Two or three hundred of them. That was alarming."
Killen's father was the local GP in the town and she recounted a time when two police men arrived at her childhood home dressed in paramilitary uniform to see him.
“They were police men and they had been at a party. They had this fancy dress on for some kind of reason and they came to the door late at night because they wanted to see my father," she continued.
“My mother opened the door and said what do you want and they said oh Mrs Killen we have come to see the doctor we are missing him down in the station.
“He used to do odd blood testing work there and she said would you not have rung up before you came he is asleep because he had had a stroke.
“They said oh we are very sorry and I said were you not frightened answering the door late at night to masked men and she said I would rather be dead than live in fear."
Killen said that she is now "anxious and risk avoidant"
Recalling her first day at school in Larne, Mary Killen added: "When I was four, I went to school and it was my first day at school and I was in a room full of other people of four and I had never met anyone of four before. I had only met people of seven which was my sisters age.
“I ran around chatting and the teacher said Mary Killen, if you don’t stop talking I will put you on your own to sit at a desk on your own behind the door for the rest of the year and she carried out her threat.
“Of course I didn’t tell my parents because I thought they would say that I was very naughty and she was right to do that but that is why I have got an insatiable social appetite now. I think it must date back to that."
Mary also recalled assisting in her father's surgery as she got older.
“When I was growing up my fathers surgery was in the house in the days before health centres in Northern Ireland so I was used to six to twelve people coming twice a day," she said.
“Sometimes I worked as his receptionist when I was a bit older and his receptionist was on holiday.
“I loved the interaction with other people and so I am programmed psychologically to have six to twelve chats a day.”
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