YEARS ON FROM ATTACK
goes on: “Getting older and wiser, we have become more like best friends than mother and daughter. Parts of this book were difficult to write.
“Mum wrote her diaries 10 years ago, but reading them for me was totally new and a real eye-opener.
“I thought about it from a different perspective of ‘what would I do if that was my children’, or ‘how would I cope, would I deal with it in the way she did?’
“I think it’s been cathartic for my mum to do the book as we read each other’s writing. And maybe it gave her a bit of closure too.”
Diane poured her heart into her diaries as she and Katie’s barber dad David nursed their girl back from the brink of death. She heartbreakingly recalls when Katie first came round and, unable to speak, wrote the words “Kill me” on paper.
DREADFUL
Diane’s diary says: “We sat with her all day... she tried to speak but her voice was rasping and gruff.
“She kept on writing... telling us dreadful things that happened to her. How she had been attacked and raped, how he was mixed up with guns and threatened to kill her... she was terrified he would come to the hospital to kill her.” Further down the line, it would be Katie’s turn to support her mother. Diane was diagnosed with bowel cancer four years ago.
Katie continues: “My mum took a long time off to look after me. She finally went back for a year or two, then took retirement and weeks later was diagnosed with cancer.
“I felt angry that she spent those years helping me and now she’s back in hospital.”
Diane has had chemotherapy and surgery and Katie is always by her side during hospital visits. She adds: “You hear of people losing their mums in their 30s or 40s, but my mum is in her 60s.
“It gives me perspective and I try to be optimistic and think ‘great, she’s surviving cancer and we’re spending a lot of time together and making the most of it’.”
Katie is ensuring her mum’s loving legacy lives on – and has proudly named her new daughter Penelope Diane.
■■From Mother to Daughter: The Things I’d Tell My Child, by Katie Piper and Diane Piper, published by Quercus, £14.99, from all good