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.
* * * * *
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.)