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The long-awaited PPS to ‘Jim Perrin climbs the property ladder’ (revised)

When we finalised the original draft of Jim Perrin Climbs the Property Ladder and quoted the words he had written about his first son, we were unaware of the back-story of this son’s formative years and only after the text was initially posted were we told that the author’s account in West was, in great part, untrue. So we revised the draft to include the information given us concerning the young woman who was for several years his third wife and an exemplary step-mother to this child: although, and it is noteworthy, a young woman about whom — after all that time — there is in the book not one single word.

No sooner however was the revised version posted than we learned that other sections of the book which dealt with the child’s earliest up-bringing were also seriously and dishonestly misleading: until then we knew only what our sister, Jac, had told us about Jim Perrin’s past, which was of course what he had chosen to tell her — and, after she died, what we later read of his ‘story’, as described in West. (The book erroneously claimed by one of his reviewers to be ‘as near autobiographical as Jim Perrin had written’… )

We are now happy to make good this omission as we realise that by the lacuna it might seem that we were acquiescing in the self-interested version written by the author; and we do not wish to give any credit to his lies, nor to allow his account to stand or remain unchallenged. Continue reading →

Jim Perrin climbs the property ladder (revised since receiving further information)

Between August, 1998 and October, 2002, Jim Perrin had, as nearly as we can work it out, at least nine addresses and he wrote in West of the period before that, whilst his first son lived with him:

‘We moved house on average once a year until he was ten years old’ , when, he says, ‘I bought a house in Dinorwig.’  (Although we did learn later that this was not the whole truth.)

Certainly he has ’moved’ around a great deal.  Except: again there is the convenient ‘air-brushing’: actually he did not, as he implies throughout this book, single-handedly raise his son, Will, but instead remarried, his third wife, whilst his son, Will, was still very small;  a toddler, barely three years old.

This young woman, who already had two children of her own and with whom he had a further child, was a very loving step-mother to Will and was mostly responsible for his upbringing in those early years.

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By 2000, when mortgages could be as easily obtained as now they are not, relatively low deposits, accommodating bank managers and repayments which in some cases were as low as rents, made property ownership a feasible plan and in April, 2000, Jim Perrin applied for and in May received, a mortgage offer. Up until that time he had always lived in rented accommodation.

He had been, however, less than honest when answering the necessary questionnaire:

Status?   Single.  Married.  Cohabiting.  Separated.  Divorced.  Widowed.

We know that by April the 28th, 2002, (and not taking into account several other ‘seriously failed’ relationships) three former wives — two of them mothers of two of his children — were divorced from Jim Perrin. And at the time of this mortgage application not only was he then still married to a fourth wife — who later had his baby — but he was also, at the same time, living, ‘co-habiting’, with a young woman who, as the records show,  subsequently gave birth to yet another of his children: although it was after she had fortuitously managed to disentangle herself from the relationship. (This was another child whom he had kept secret from our sister: she was still unaware when she died.)

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Jim Perrin thinks highly of himself

In the next section of Jim Perrin’s letter he told Jac of his intention to accept an offer for his house: there was considerable ‘psychology’ concerning their relationship, and many more ‘positive’ thoughts. He then wrote this paragraph:

‘Given that I had absolutely nothing and now have a house full of belongings and considerable equity why should I feel insecure anyway? [This must have been in response to something Jac had said to him.] Particularly since work-wise things are going very well for me, the critical reception for what I do is higher than ever, my craft is coming to fruition.‘ Again he wrote of ‘fixing up a good working environment for [her]’. (The ‘environment’ in which for nearly sixteen years she had created such lovely stained-glass!)

Her studio was known in the family as ‘the cold room’ — it still is to this day — and Jim Perrin, in the time he lived there, did nothing at all to ‘fix it up’. They were merely more of his tempting words. Not that Jac minded, it was her very personal space — one in which she felt contented and secure.

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