The physical assault on our nephew of the previous evening was so very shocking; it was an extraordinary attack: unprovoked and wicked.  Mercifully it did not end, as it could have done, in a greater tragedy — a little more force, pressure on a certain point in the neck? — there was a complete lack of any attempt at control, and the pain and the bruising were severe; luckily the intervention of others brought the episode to an end. (Although her son did report Jim Perrin’s attack on him to the police the following day.)

What could Jim Perrin do after such a display of fury and violence?  How could he now redeem himself?

He locked himself in his caravan and would not come out…

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He would not at first communicate at all, until finally, speaking to our sister by telephone from his caravan to the house, he threatened to commit suicide. For hours that day he put our sister and her daughter through the most intense emotional turmoil: clearly, he was quite unbalanced, and indulging himself in hysteria…

Our niece, when in her bedroom later, heard her mother crying and sobbing in her own room and went along the corridor. It was apparent from what she overheard that Jim Perrin was threatening to kill himself and that her mother was pleading with him to do no such thing — yet, young as she was, uncertain and fearing to intrude she waited awhile outside the bedroom door rather than go into her mother’s room.

Finally Jac seemed to become calmer and she went down the stairs and out to the caravan. Our niece explained later to her ‘Welsh’ aunt when telling her of all this, that she was so extremely worried that she discreetly followed her mother and lingered outside the caravan in the gloom of that winter evening to see if Jac would need her or if indeed, she might have to go for outside help.

She told how she saw Jac go up the step to the caravan, slip, and stumbling, fall over the metal edge of the door frame. Jim Perrin, she said, virtually dragged Jac inside, not caringly but in her words: ‘hauled her roughly’ into the caravan. So roughly that the little cap which by now she was wearing (the effects of her chemotherapy being well-advanced) flew from her head.

Our niece, waiting outside and very shocked yet not wishing to be thought to interfere, watched until all seemed to have quietened and settled down and then withdrawing she returned to the house.

Jac herself later told her ‘Welsh’ sister this very thing and said that he had not been gentle with her, nor even did he pick up the little cap for her — and on top of all else that had happened, how vulnerable and exposed she had felt in those moments. Our hearts are filled with such sadness for this sister — for the rough handling and the emotional bullying that she was subjected to by Jim Perrin.

Jac had in the course of that day telephoned her sisters and her ‘Yorkshire’ sister drove down immediately.  She and her ‘Welsh’ sister spent the rest of that night trying to comfort her, as she told them how Jim Perrin had assaulted her son the evening before and how, since then, he had ‘gone to ground’ in his caravan; that he had refused all contact with her until finally telling her of his intention to commit suicide and how he had told her that he had a knife and that he had said he was going to use it to kill himself… He stayed in his caravan and didn’t appear until the following day.

Jac had her penultimate chemotherapy session booked within the next day or so, but in view of all that had happened she and her sisters arranged between them that her daughter would, after that session, drive her to Yorkshire where she would stay for three weeks. They felt she was no longer safe in her own home.

Jac’s sisters.