An Irvine Royal Academy pupil has spoken of her terror when she heard the bomb go off at the concert in Manchester on Monday which took the lives of 22 people. 

Fifteen-year-old Ayli McInnes travelled down south with her mum Helen, dad John and friend Rachel Gallacher to see Ariana Grande after the pop superstar announced she wasn't playing any dates in Scotland.

Ayli said: "Inside it was like a movie with everyone running, when we were going down the stairs, Rachel asked why I was holding on to her and all you heard was the bomb and you felt it go through you and you felt your whole body move. Rachel turned round and my face went white and we ran."

Helen McInnes, Ayli's mum, told us how they didn't know what was going on and how lucky they felt.

She said: "We were sitting on the stairs and there was a lot of other parents there and a lot of people had came out. They had started to come out early and we were asking why. 

"The guy next to us was on the phone and I asked him if that was it finished and he said there was one more song to go and I said that Ayli will definitely not come out until it is totally finished. Then the top doors completely opened and we thought that must be it finished now and people were filtering out. 

"We had arranged with the girls to meet them and told them make sure you know the surroundings, because we’ll be here and it is going to be really, really busy. 

"And then the next thing you heard the bang. Me and John just looked at each other and the guy next to us said ,‘Just stay still, it’ll be nothing’ .
"My legs just went to jelly. It was literally seconds after that you heard screaming. 

"Everyone was screaming and running and it was just chaos. John just said to me to stand to the side and I was trying not to lose him at the same time. 

"All of a sudden the two of them appeared just in front of us. Ayli had seen her dad."

The family had decided beforehand that they would travel home straight after the concert and the four of them left without hesitation - before they really knew what was going on.

Helen, who works as a hairdresser, explained: "We went straight to the car, we had arranged to come home anyway straight after the concert.

"Because we had got out and away as quickly we still didn’t know what had happened but there was police and ambulances passing us on the road, and we thought it couldn’t have been anything good. 

"We thought we were maybe overreacting."

Ayli described the terror of the incident and how security guards tried to calm down the concert-goers in the immediate aftermath of the bomb going off. 

She said: "It was like something out of a movie with everyone and squashed together and all the security guards were shouting ‘calm down, calm down’ and you couldn’t because you didn’t know what was happening. 

"Everybody kept saying it’s a balloon, it’s just a balloon and I was like ‘No, it’s no’.

"When we were running the first thought that came to my head was ‘I’m dead’ and Rachel felt the same. It was horrible.

"Rachel tripped and I had to keep her up. You felt so crushed, and I felt that was it. 

"I can’t keep the noises of everybody running out of my head.

"It feels like a dream, it doesn’t feel real."

Helen added: "You can’t believe how lucky you are.

"It is sheer luck they had the seats they had and they could get out that way. You just keep thinking what if we parked the car in a different place, what if we had met them a different entrance, what if it had went off at a different time and we weren’t waiting for them. 

"You just don’t think, when you see things like this on the TV, that it would happen and we never saw the worst of it so God knows how all the people feel that did."