From the outside, the small gathering of young girls looked like an ordinary playdate. They chatted giddily, practised pilates and twirled around in their new outfits to the music of Harry Styles.

But on the sidelines, some of the parents were in tears. The last time these girls shared a room was on 29 July 2024. That day, they fled in fear as a hooded teenager turned a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club in Southport into one of the most horrific attacks on children in modern British history.

Three girls – Elsie Dot Stancombe, aged seven, Bebe King, six, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine – were murdered and eight other children and two adults were stabbed repeatedly, some critically injured.

The idea that any of the surviving children would feel able to meet again seemed impossible until recently. Only now, nearly two years on, the parents of five of those girls are ready to speak.

Over nearly four hours of interviews, they told the Guardian of their daughters’ heroism that day, when girls of primary school age saved lives by shielding others from the attacker, and how they feel their courage risks being forgotten.

None of the families can be identified so their names have been changed in this article.

Daisy was seven when she and her best friend went to the Hart Space for what should have been a highlight of their summer. Many of the girls were making bracelets, minutes away from being picked up by their parents, when an older boy walked in carrying a 20cm knife. At first, some thought it was a prank.

She put her arms around the girls as he started to attack them. As they fled, some falling over, Daisy helped one girl down the stairs and shielded another by crouching over her as the attack continued.

CCTV footage showed Daisy staggering outside, only to be grabbed by the killer and dragged back inside. She was stabbed 33 times and lost her entire blood volume, leaving her in a coma for five days.

In the many stories of heroism that day, the bravery of those girls had been lost, said Daisy’s mother. “I felt so devastated for her, that we’re at home building up this recovery for her, saying: ‘You saved yourself,’ when the world has no idea what she’s done.”

When she woke from her coma, Daisy was reunited with Amber, eight, whom she had shielded and helped to escape. They had been placed on the same ward at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool and, one morning, her parents pulled back the curtain and “their faces lit up”.

“They were wearing the same Lilo & Stitch nightie,” said Daisy’s mother. “They didn’t know each other’s name at that point, they just knew they were together. They were really happy to see each other and they’ve formed a really special bond.”

Amber had been desperate to go to the Hart Space event with her 10-year-old sister, Bethany. It was fully booked within days of being advertised, with 26 children in the room that day. Bella, also 10, messaged her friends excitedly that morning.

Bella was nearest the door when Axel Rudakubana arrived at 11.45am, and was the first to be attacked. She was stabbed three times to the back with enough force to penetrate her chest wall, but still she managed to escape. She was minutes from death on the street when paramedics arrived from a Midlands air ambulance, which was only in the region by coincidence as it returned from an abandoned job elsewhere.

“She had finished bleeding out – she had no blood pressure or anything – and would have died on the scene [if it wasn’t for that],” said Bella’s mother, holding a stuffed toy air ambulance she now cherishes. The sheer luck of the Midlands crew flying nearby has made her believe in a “higher power”, she said. “You couldn’t have planned that divine timing.”

As the horror unfolded, Bethany shielded Amber from the blows, suffering several wounds herself. When the older sister woke up in hospital, her first thoughts were about Amber. “Is she OK?” she asked.

“[Bella] saved her sister’s life that day,” said her mother. “The word ‘heroes’ is thrown about and people are heroes for what they did on that day. They saved themselves, they got themselves out of this building, they ran [and] they did their absolute best when many of them were critically injured.”

One of the first to escape that day was Charlotte, then nine. She was stabbed three times to the back as she ran, fracturing her shoulder blade and vertebrae. Despite her ordeal, she had “no self-pity” and wore her scars with “dignity and defiance”, her mother said, describing her as “immensely brave, extremely vulnerable and alone”.

“Our daughter made the split-second decision to get out of that building whilst suffering incomprehensible injuries,” she said. “She fled out of instinct – not direction or shielding. There is never a single story. Our daughter is our hero and her own hero.”

The days after the attack are a complete blur for many of the families. Many of them spent more than a week in hospital not knowing whether their girls would pull through or, if they did, what lasting damage had been done. Outside, rioters torched asylum hotels, police vans and libraries in a frenzy of race-fuelled violence across England.

Most of the families were in the dark about the riots and are wary of speaking about it now. However, Bella’s mother said how one of the police officers who helped their daughter was attacked the following night by rioters in Southport. “They still had our daughter’s blood on them and they were getting bricks thrown at them,” she said.

There is no magic formula to recovering from childhood trauma, let alone an experience so viscerally shocking. Many of the girls and their parents receive support from psychologists and counsellors but the memory of that day is raw and triggers are everywhere: a song on the radio, a man walking alone, even other children.

Amber is “constantly on alert of anyone, her trust is completely gone”, her mother said. After dropping Bethany at school one morning, they saw an old man walking his dog nearby as they drove away. Amber insisted her mother call the school to check Bethany was OK.

The two sisters, now 10 and 12, refuse to shower alone because they don’t want to be by themselves. For their mother, this presents another trigger: “I have to sit on the toilet [while they shower] and I see their scars all the time. As a parent it’s traumatising because it’s a constant reminder of what they have and still are going through.”

The parents worry that as their girls become teenagers they will be more conscious about their scars. When Bella, now 12, started secondary school last year, her parents told her not to tell other children she was caught up in the attack. “Don’t make that who you are,” they told her. She has to wear pressure garments 23 hours a day and sleeps in a splint to help her scars heal.

On her first day at the new school, an older boy had found out and asked her: “Why aren’t you dead?”

“She was sobbing on her first day of school,” said Bella’s mother. Before the attack she threw herself into hobbies, such as drama. Now she won’t go: “She doesn’t like being with other kids she doesn’t know.” At Christmas, they took her to a pantomime where children were invited to go on stage. She refused, telling her father: “The last time I went out with a load of kids I got stabbed.”

Many of the parents have become friends, sharing these difficult conversations together.

Daisy, now nine, is still processing her memories of that day and the weeks before it. She had forgotten about a trip to London a month earlier to see her idol Swift in concert, and shopping with her friends the day before. Earlier this month, she recalled for the first time a particularly harrowing scene from the attack – the moment she was dragged back in the building.

“When it first happened we were like: ‘OK, imagine your brain is a bookshelf. What happened to you has basically tipped all of your books on the floor and all the books are memories, they will be jumbled up now,’” her mother said.

They told her that some of the books might be scary and she could put them back on the shelf in her own time. “For a little while now, she’s been saying: ‘There’s two books on the floor and they’re really scary and I don’t want to pick them up.’

“And so we’ve said: ‘OK, we’re just going to tuck them under the bookshelf for now.’ Last week, she decided that was the time to tell us about one of the books and it was her experience of being taken back in. So she’s still processing moments of that day that she hasn’t verbalised before, and we’re nearly two years on.”

Many of the parents have had difficulty accessing their own psychological support. Some have post-traumatic stress disorder, suffering flashbacks and night terrors, having rushed into the building searching for their children and later finding them gravely injured nearby.

Yet many were only entitled to 12 sessions with a counsellor provided by the charity Victim Support, rather than a specialist psychiatrist. Daisy’s parents said they were effectively forced to “ration” this support, saving some counselling sessions for the criminal trial and public inquiry, rather than access it immediately.

Daisy’s father was refused more than 12 sessions because there was no funding for it. “Our experience has been more frustrating than we would have liked,” said Daisy’s mother. “It’s hard to have to justify why you’re traumatised [and] really quickly we realised the basic counselling offer was not fit for purpose for what we had gone through.”

The Southport inquiry was devastating in its findings about the missed opportunities to prevent the attack. Many of the parents knew about the systemic failings – multiple authorities passing the buck for nearly five years – but it was the errors of individuals, particularly the killer’s parents and some officials, they found most shocking. Bella’s father said “there’s got to be accountability” on the part of the attacker’s parents: “If I had a dog and it killed a kid, who’s getting done for it?”

Merseyside police had investigated whether the parents could be held criminally responsible for their teenage son’s actions, given they knew he posed a risk to others and had amassed weapons in their home. However, there is no duty on parents under UK law to warn or report criminality, so detectives felt they were unable to prosecute.

“Clearly there were masses of opportunities for them to stop their own child,” said Charlotte’s father. “I can understand the conflict in their own mind about doing that but at the same time there were plenty of opportunities.”

In the Easter holidays, six of the girls met again for the first time. The playdate was made as relaxed and fun as possible and they did pilates, shared cupcakes and wore yoga outfits specially made for those who wanted to hide their scars.

As they watched, some of the parents were in tears. “I’m happy, I’m relieved, it’s OK to see me cry,” Daisy’s mother said, as her daughter comforted her that day.

Afterwards, the families went for pizza because the girls did not want to leave one another. Daisy told her mother: “It was like having big sisters”. They plan to meet up again – this time with 17 of the girls – at the end of May.

When they got home, Bella told her parents it was the “happiest she’d been in a long time”. The girls had not spoken about what happened, she said: “We all just knew.”