Our sister met Jim Perrin at a reading on the evening of October the 29th, in 2002. Jac had known him nearly three decades earlier — as she explained to us, ‘briefly and intermittently’ — and there had been no contact at all in the intervening years: he was in the past.
At the time of the meeting he was living in Llanrhaeadr ym Mochnant — although he had been there for less than a fortnight — a removal firm had delivered his possessions from his previous address in Ruabon only on the 18th of that month, as the receipt for the payment of their services showed.
However, having met her only on the 29th of October, 2002, and seeing very little of her up to the Christmas of that year he wrote:
‘Over Christmas she was away on a dutiful and extended tour of relations‘.
Away? The implication — and this book is very largely based on implication — being that she was not (‘as usual’?) living with him…
Nor was she! Nor had she been! She was living in her own home celebrating Christmas as she had always done, with her children and family and with her partner of sixteen years. (Ref. our post ‘Jac’s Last Long Relationship’.)
Note ‘dutiful’! Note ‘extended tour of relations’! Jac did not go ‘away on a dutiful and extended tour of relations’. The passage was sophistry; the purest fabrication. Total lies.
And, so far as his own situation was concerned, Jim Perrin was not minded to tell our sister the truth about that! It certainly did not suit his purpose to be straight with her…
The secret he was concealing from Jac was that not long before meeting her he had been involved with another woman, one who had become the mother of his latest, very new baby daughter — and that it was only recently that they had parted, with much acrimony: although of course our sister had no idea then of his history in that respect; had heard no rumours and had no way of knowing.
His relationship with Jac was only in the early stage: she was in an already existing partnership of long-standing and she still lived in the home she shared with that partner — albeit in the uneasy stage of sad ambiguity which those in failing relationships must sometimes experience. It was not yet over between them…
Again and again Jim Perrin implies throughout this dishonest account that Jac ‘lived’ with him at his house. She never did. And, it follows, she could not have been ‘away’ over Christmas. It was, on his part, wishful thinking and yet, when his wish was fulfilled and he did live with our sister, you have only to read our post Jim Perrin’s Christmas for the harrowing details of his deliberate cruelty to her, two years later, during the last Christmas of her life.
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In 2003, on occasion, Jac did stay in Llanrhaeadr ym Mochnant and then, in July — after the injury to her ribs — for less than three weeks, while she was recovering: a period during which he exerted complete control over her (as we explained in an earlier post: Things Began to Change) and after which he wrote: ‘When you began to re-engage [!] with your former acquaintances [!] and with your family, [!] things began to go wrong.’
These are the words of a man with very strange ideas indeed and we believe — after all the evidence of his subsequent behaviour to her — of a man with a pathologically controlling personality.
Up to, and following that time, Jac lived in her own home with her partner and, after resting her injury, she worked with him installing her glass in his latest playground construction — as well as giving a work-shop with him: she was living her own life, still quite separately from Jim Perrin.
Before the end of September however, he had engineered the final dislodging of that partner, sold his own house in Llanrhaeadr ym Mochnant and had moved lock, stock and cat into her house. Fait accompli.
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So: she never ‘lived’ with him at his house, as he continually states or implies, and indeed he lived there himself barely a year — travelling away a good deal of that time. But he was aware, yet of course did not reveal to our sister, that there were pressing financial (and other, major,) reasons that he should sell and leave his known address.
Jac had a small vintage caravan which Jim Perrin replaced with one he bought to be used as his study. It was by now September and the decision to move to her house had been agreed.
Contrary to his claim on page 216 in West, Jac’s house was where he lived: there was no piped water or sewerage ‘connected’ to his caravan as he wrote, and it was only a few yards away from our sister’s house. This was where he lived — not in his caravan— after he sold his own property. (Although certainly a caravan with a little wood-burning stove was a delightful retreat when there was a houseful of young adults, teenagers, and their friends.)
Nevertheless, despite Jim Perrin’s constant claims that he ‘lived’ with Jac in that caravan, it was not true. He lived, as we said, in her house and he transferred from his own his furniture and effects — replacing our sister’s things and discarding, even destroying, many of them: and he took over the running of her household so that she lost most of her autonomy, a loss which she had never experienced before. In fact she soon realised that he was not what she had thought him to be, and she found herself living with a dominating and very controlling man. This was from the outset and had nothing to do with her later illness — there could be no excuse that he was ‘caring for his woman in her time of dying’!
All this apart, only imagine, hard-pressed as we know he was, what relief he must have felt when he no longer had to pay mortgage instalments… and he was living at an address unknown to the CSA…
It suited Jim Perrin very well to live there as we know for certain that it was he who was so heavily over-extended financially (ref. our previous post) at the time of his removal to our sister’s house, and that the state of his own finances was so desperate that his necessary move there was to a ‘safe haven’ indeed. It can be seen from his letters to her, written even before her injury in July, how he began his manoeuvres and set about solving his worsening financial crisis. (And, and this was significantly more important — far more, even than money-matters — to escape the attentions of the CSA who had been told by his former partner of his latest address in Llanrhaeadr ym Mochnant.)
Jac’s sisters.