MY GIRL J.K.

0 Comments | Sunday Mirror, Jun 22, 2003 | by MIKE HAMILTON

Peter said: "Anne was a wonderful woman - quiet but with a very strong mind. She encouraged Jo to read."

Joanne wrote the first book in the Harry Potter series seven years after her mother died. The dedication reads: "For Jessica, who loves stories, for Anne, who loved them too, and for Di, who heard this one first."

Joanne has said she realised that in writing Harry Potter she had given the hero "lots of feelings about my own mother's death". It was not until her fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, that she devoted one of her works to her father. It was suggested that she was furious with Peter over his marriage to second wife Janet, 50, after her mother's death.

A rift is said to have developed because Peter met Janet, his former secretary at the Rolls-Royce factory in Bristol, while Anne was ill with MS.

But Peter said: "It is all lies. It has been suggested I was drawn to Janet while Anne was fighting her illness. Well, that is a bloody insult. I was not drawn to anybody while Anne was alive and for some time after her death. I have worried in the past that, if Joanne keeps reading it, she will believe it. People say there is no smoke without fire. But I have spoken to Joanne and told her it's not true and she accepts that."

Peter said his relationship with Janet did not start until December 1991 - more than a year after Anne's death.

The couple married in a low-key affair at Newport Register Office in 1993. Neither Joanne nor Dianne - now 35 and a solicitor in Edinburgh - attended. But Peter insists his daughters' relationship with his wife is fine.

"Joanne and Janet get on like a house on fire. Whenever I go to Scotland to visit Jo, Neil and the kids, Janet is with me. I get on with Neil well. He's a great bloke."

Despite his daughter's massive wealth, Peter and Janet are content to live in a small two-bedroom apartment in Swanage, Dorset.

He laughed off a recent story suggesting he was struggling to make a living working in a burger van. The van is, in fact, run by his brother-in-law David Evans. Peter and Janet helped him to set it up and do the books.

Peter said: "People want to portray the image that I am struggling and make a comparison with Joanne.

"I am not a rich man, but I am certainly not a pauper. Jo is not mean and has offered me things but I have said no. As far as I am concerned, I am her dad and it is up to me to provide for her, not the other way around.

"She has given me and Janet fantastic holidays and gifts, and looks after her sister and her close friends. But I have never asked her for money and never would do. Joanne is a rich woman - and good luck to her.

"I am glad she has done so well, but it's a tremendous burden as well because she gets hassled all the time. I don't like it and any parent would occasionally be upset and protective if they were in my position."

He adds: "I find it odd people can think that we don't get on. Isn't it funny she dedicated a book to me if that is the case?

"What no one knows is that I took Joanne and Di to Portugal in June 1991, six months after Anne passed away as we tried to come to terms with it. If there was some sort of rift at that time, we would hardly have gone on a family holiday. We have discussed all these stories saying we don't get on and it has actually made us closer.