When the author Jan Morris reviewed ‘West:’  in IWA’s journal, AGENDA  on 25/12/2010, she posed this question:  ‘Is it good or bad to be proprioceptive?’   We replied to this review in a post of our own:  ‘Our response to a review by Jan Morris.’  ‘The point ”proprioceptive” is most pertinent to our sister’s story. Jim Perrin has made cleverly libel-less statements in these passages. We know to whom he refers, as do others also. He knows that we know (as they say) and it is a serious matter which we will be writing about in a future post.’

This is the post:

Jim Perrin had written about our sister — with a reference to her former husband which was virtually libellous, and described, with an almost abnormally distasteful relish, injuries which he claimed she had received at his hands. He said:  ‘a previous man in her life had beaten her savagely about the head, and her corrective balance was gone.’ And on page 220, describing an accident,  he wrote:  ‘she had fallen in the night at the flat where she was staying, had cracked her lumbar vertebra.’ He could not have known this — there was no medical  examination.  (See Jac’s accident to read his description of another accident which befell her.)

Clearly Jim Perrin was not inclined to admit that our sister was ‘staying’ with one of her beloved sons — the son whom he hated with a vengeance and was to attack in the near future; ref. Jim Perrin’s breaking point. It was Jac’s first visit to this son’s flat and in an unfamiliar and unlit corridor, uncertain of her way, she fell awkwardly as she lost her footing on an uneven step. She told us of this when she returned to Wales.

But,  Jim Perrin wrote:  ‘These falls were the result of the man [actually her husband, as Jim Perrin very well knows] she had been with for several years during the time we were out of contact [sic] punching her with full force on the side of her head. She was concussed for days by the blow, her proprioceptive faculties permanently damaged, the cervical vertebra out of alignment. The injuries from her fall [at her son’s flat] were a direct result of that assault, fifteen years before: its effect on her life had been catastrophic.’

That was an unfounded and altogether ridiculous allegation, and we in the family know of the incident referred to and which, here, Jim Perrin so grossly misrepresented for his own malicious reasons. It was no-one’s business but that of our late sister and her former husband; whatever tiff might have taken place in their past it was insufficiently important to influence their lives together and Jac went on to marry and to have three wonderful children with the man Jim Perrin so libellously accused of being, essentially, a monster of cruelty.

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It is noteworthy that in his phrase: ‘During the time we were out of contact…’ Jim Perrin was using his favoured ploy of implication. It was well over three decades (during which he had married six times and had, so far as we know, seven children) since Jac had anything to do with him, and as she explained to us later when we discussed him at length she had lived her life happily with no thought of him at all… And then, on page 295, he used the same trick. (Our italics): ‘In 1973, shortly after parting from Jacquetta the first time around I went to live in an isolated cottage, ”Brithdir Mawr”, a mile or so from the head of Cwm Pennant. The four years I spent here held in compensatory balance now with the four years of my grieving.’

He was writing this in 2009, as Jac had died in 2005, and it was yet another example of Jim Perrin’s deceptive ways with words: ‘In 1973, shortly after parting…’ He did not part from our sister — they were never together: and as to his second sentence, it seems there was little question of ‘grieving’ after Jac died. He had soon involved himself with another young woman, and negotiations to buy a property with her funds. Ref.  Of nature diarist Jim Perrin:  can a leopard change its spots?  She went to live with him in Llanrhaeadr ym Mochnant in the house to which he moved, as he wrote in the book,   ‘…on the first anniversary of Jac’s funeral service.’ He did not write that he moved in with another partner that day…

That relationship quickly failed as did the one which followed, and we know of others  ‘in the four years of my grieving’ — as well as several more in the years up to the present. All ended in trauma for the women who trusted Jim Perrin, and who were defrauded by him in a pattern long-established: it would appear that over the years he has perfected this aspect of his modus operandi. (Should he refute what we have said he well knows that we are telling only the truth. And it is such a sad truth; there have been so many blighted lives. There are, of course, witnesses as to the veracity of what we say.)

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Someone still resident in that lovely Welsh valley of Cwm Pennant remembers those four years from 1973 when Jim Perrin was living there: ‘We all knew he took women to his place.’ The records show that he married, first, in 1973 — and we have been told how ‘he savagely beat’ a partner around that time. Given this information, we strongly believe that what Jim Perrin wrote about Jac’s former husband was something of which he had himself been guilty…

Among the men we know, or have known, only one has ever been described as having ‘beaten a woman savagely’ — our sister’s sometime partner, JIM PERRIN. When Jac first became involved with him a close friend warned her that ‘it was well-known in North Wales that he had a reputation for bullying and violence’ — and in particular how he had attacked a former wife. She was understandably seriously alarmed by this and told her sisters, and in their presence she asked him for an explanation.

At first he tried to brush it away and vehemently denied it, saying that we ‘should not listen to rumours’ but should believe him. However there were three of us there and we were intent on discovering the truth; we  believed Jac’s friend whom we all knew and loved and trusted absolutely. Finally, and only after his continued attempts to dismiss the report, he admitted that ‘yes, [he] had punched her — she had provoked [him]’; it had been ‘a heat of the moment thing’; he ‘bitterly regretted it’ etc. He ‘had changed’, he said, and promised that Jac could trust him; she should know he would never do anything to hurt her. Still: men who do physically abuse their partners, when once they have crossed that inviolate boundary unchallenged and unpunished, invariably are likely to act in that way again. We now know this was the case with Jim Perrin.

Readers of our posts are now aware how well he kept that promise to our sister… But after Jac died, and  we set up this site, we have been told by other young women of the violence they suffered at Jim Perrin’s hands.

Jac’s sisters.