CHRISTINE Corbett was celebrating her 30th birthday with friends at her house in Torrens Drive, in north Belfast's Cliftonville Road area, when a loyalist protest started at the top of the street.
"The crowd came down the street and started banging on the door," she told a press conference called hurriedly by Sinn Fein to describe how four families had been forced out of their homes on Monday night.
"We were lying down on the floor with our feet against it when the brick came through the window," she continued. "They threw a child's bike through the front window. There was a crowd of women across the street screaming they were going to kill us."
Oldpark RUC station is only a few yards away. The police came and advised Ms Corbett and her three children to take what they could and move out.
"There was no time to take anything. I have just the clothes I'm standing in."
Ms Amanda Connolly lived in Alliance Avenue. She said a loyalist crowd came down the road and dragged a man through his hedge and beat him badly. "The residents asked the RUC to put a Land-Rover at the top of the street, but they said they did not have the resources. The Land-Rover was going up and down and not protecting us at all.
"I've got children. I had to get them out last night. They were terrified.
Denise Dorian moved into the Torrens area after the ceasefire because she wanted her children to grow up in a mixed area, and she sends her children to the local mixed school.
"At 1 a.m. women were marching up and down across the road singing loyalist songs. People we lived with, people whose kids our kids played with, are moving us out of our houses.
She too moved out last night. This morning her house was a burnt-out shell. "I'll have to move my daughter from school as well," she said.
Chairing the press conference, a local Sinn Fein activist, Mr Martin Meehan, said: "This morning's news is not about Drumcree. It's about refugees, about children and furniture being thrown into the street and homes burned.
"Paisley and Trimble can't wash their hands of this. This is a result of sabre-rattling down in Drumcree. These people have nothing to do with Drumcree.
He added: "The nationalist people will not be intimidated. We're not going back to 1969."
News was coming in to the community centre where the press conference was taking place of another family, a single parent and her three children, moving out of the area.
Around the corner in Torrens Avenue, men were loading possessions into a van. The harassed-looking woman packing in the house did not want to talk to the press. Asked why they were moving, one man said: "I don't know. They just said they can't take another night of it."
In the small front garden two children were digging newly-planted geraniums and pansies out of a freshly-dug flower bed and carefully placing them in a cardboard box.
Men removed a cooker, a television, bags of clothes, a coffee table, and, finally, a cage carrying a hamster.
At the backs of the houses, wooden doors led into the backyards. Some of the doors, those belonging to Catholic houses, had graffiti on them. That on Christine Corbett's read: "Taigs out. Your (sic) next ". Another read: "Taigs Out" They went up when the IRA ceasefire ended, according to a local man.
The RUC has denied allegations that officers did not do enough to protect these Catholic families.
Insp Liam Flaherty from Oldpark RUC station said: "The police were stretched. We did our best with limited resources. I've been out myself talking to people and leading members of the Roman Catholic community have said they appreciated our efforts."