When I was blown up I was watching It’s a Knockout. Seconds after one of the European nations played their “joker” there was an almighty boom, an invisible force propelled my father and me across the front living room and the panes of glass from the windows scattered in slivers and fragments all over our bodies.

My dad had dived on top on me as we crashed to the floor and, even above the ringing in my ears caused by the explosion, I could hear a hyperventilating Stuart Hall on the TV: “Ha ha ha, look at the Belgians, just look at the Belgians.”

It was the summer of 1975 and we were targeted in the car bomb attack because our home at 1 Eliza Street was beside Mooney’s Bar in the Market area of Belfast. This was the time of the pub bombings and shootings – when sectarian attacks were mounted on punters in bars all over Northern Ireland, but particularly in my home city.

Growing up beside Mooney’s, which stretched around the corner of Cromac and Eliza Streets, was both idyllic and dangerous. My sister Cathy and I used to love running up the long stairs to the kitchen above the bar, where Mrs Mooney would make the most delicious, finely cut, salad sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper – a real treat for lunch on school days. There were Saturday afternoons of orange crush mineral, potato crisps, the Doctor and the Daleks while watching the marvel of colour TV in the lounge bar as my parents chatted over pints to relatives and friends. Yet there was also the ever-present threat of being killed, even while out playing football or swinging around the lamp-post facing Murdock’s horse stables across the road.

A few months before the blue Cortina exploded outside our door, I had been shooting penalties into a net chalked around the wooden door of Mooney’s keg house, to the left of the lounge bar entrance. Then the real shooting started. It was a Friday afternoon, with my friend Billy and me re-enacting the penalty the West German team had scored in the World Cup final the previous summer. I noticed a white Cortina with orange puffed-up pillows in the back seat cruising Cromac Street. I thought nothing of it until, on about the third journey back up Cromac, the window wound down and a black pipe-like object stuck out. Then the man pulled the trigger of what we were later told was a Sterling submachine gun raked the area in front of the pub and our “penalty box” with gunfire. Being seasoned war babies, we adhered to the drill our parents taught us – Billy and I dived onto our bellies as the bullets whizzed above our heads. Neither of us was injured.

Nor were my father and I badly hurt by the bomb that shook our house and smashed up everything except the TV, which continued to show European citizens playing silly games in what they called Jeux Sans Frontières, the international version of It’s A Knockout. Later that night, the police who arrived to search around the house, along with a British army patrol, told my dad that the Ulster Volunteer Force had probably put the car bomb outside our front window, and that the aim had probably been to hit some of Mooney’s punters on their way for a Friday night tipple. Fortunately, the only casualties were my father and me, and our injuries were minimal.

I explain to the UVF leaders about the bomb left at our door. One replies: Sorry, son, it was nothing personal

Fast forward 18 years to 1993 – I am sitting in a dank, dingy “office” on the Shankill Road in what used to be a fish-and-chip shop known as the Eagle. It is the headquarters of the UVF in their Shankill heartland at a time when Northern Ireland, as in 1975, is perilously close to outright civil war.

I am here to interview the UVF brigade staff in my first encounter with the oldest illegal loyalist armed movement on the island. It is partly to write an article for the Evening Press in Dublin, prompted by information from an ex-Official IRA figure who tells me there is a serious debate inside the UVF about calling a ceasefire, even before the Provisional IRA is prepared to do so. However, I am also there to establish some connections because the brilliant veteran journalist Jim Cusack and I are considering writing a book about the loyalist terror group.

This is a nervous and uncertain period to be on the Shankill Road, inside the HQ of the UVF. It is only a few weeks after the IRA atrocity at Frizzell’s fish shop down the road, and the UVF and Ulster Defence Association are engaged in a bloody revenge spree of blatant sectarian assassination that includes Catholic victims ranging from council workers to taxi drivers. To say I did not feel totally safe in this environment would be my personal understatement of 1993.

As I climb the stairs to meet the UVF leadership, I am gripped by fear. I sit down at a table facing men with granite faces and sour expressions, and try pathetically to break the ice. I tell them who I am, who I work for, and then remind them that, had their bomb makers been as efficient as, say, the Provisional IRA, I would not be here today.

I’m recalling what I heard the policeman whisper to my father after our almost fatal knockout in ’75. The UVF bomb-maker had placed the explosive device the wrong way inside the hijacked car, so the blast shot up vertically into the air, limiting the shock wave to breaking glass, and temporarily deafening my father and me.

The UVF leaders look perplexed. I have to explain that I am still on the planet only thanks to the partial ineptitude of the “team” that left the blue Cortina at our door. One of them replies with a snigger: “Sorry, son, it was nothing personal.”

Another, however, has no time for golden-oldie Troubles stories. He wants to talk about what the IRA and Sinn Féin are up to, and rumours that the Provisionals are edging towards a ceasefire. I tell him that I believe it is true and that I have sources who insist that, despite the slaughter at Frizzell’s and the subsequent carnage at Greysteel, the Provo leadership are inching towards calling off their “war”.

I ask this man, who has a walrus moustache and a pipe, what is his message to the PIRA/Sinn Féin leadership. He takes a puff on the pipe, blows out a jet of smoke into the air, and says: “Tell them directly – you stop, we stop. Simple as that.”

It is only later, talking to the Official IRA source, who was in Long Kesh at the same time in the 1970s, that I learn who this pipe-smoking UVF man is: David Ervine. Within three years he would be in talks with John Major in Downing Street, and a strong supporter of the Good Friday agreement.

Henry McDonald was the Guardian and Observer’s Ireland correspondent for more than two decades. This is an edited extract from Reporting the Troubles, a collection of journalists’ memories of the period, to be published by Blackstaff Press on 5 October