Letter 2:

‘How to get out of this cycle of stress and recrimination?’ ∼ ‘We clearly have difficulties with each other and maybe we cannot resolve them.’ ∼ ‘I think we were in enough difficulty before Will’s death.’ ∼ ‘All the unresolved tensions have built up and collapsed on top of us.’ ∼ ‘This is necessarily from my side — it’s my view of things; my problems, and I am writing this down — as maybe I should have done months and months ago.’ ∼ ‘It was much more difficult.’ ∼ ‘When I moved in here I was shocked as well by the general chaos, self-centredness, destructiveness, that went on.’

‘I remember little incidents that could stand for many — and that is a recurrent theme in all of this.’ ∼ ‘Nobody else did very much at all to help in the everyday running of the house.’ ∼ ‘You were critical of me having that confab (with the boys) — you did not like it being done and accused me outright of hypocrisy.’ ∼ ‘I could go off at a tangent here — on the generally unhelpful outside intervention there has been in this situation, but to keep to the point, within the first month(s) of my being here, substantial problems had arisen between us which have been working through for over a year now, exacerbated by [her son’s name].’ ∼ ‘It has led to my becoming more and more angry and hence, unreasonable and hence, extreme in my vocabulary.’ ∼ ‘I see yet another instance of something serious going unaddressed, of evasion — and I rage against it. It’s a horrible mess Jac.’

It can be seen so clearly how Jim Perrin uses his words to bombard our sister, and to ‘wrong-foot’ her; she had gone to Yorkshire to avoid this very thing — the behaviour to which he constantly subjected her at home. It is  obvious in this letter how intent on bullying her he is; subtly and not so subtly even ‘at distance’…

Jac’s sisters.