When we finalised the original draft of Jim Perrin Climbs the Property Ladder and quoted the words he had written about his first son, we were unaware of the back-story of this son’s formative years and only after the text was initially posted were we told that the author’s account in West was, in great part, untrue. So we revised the draft to include the information given us concerning the young woman who was for several years his third wife and an exemplary step-mother to this child: although, and it is noteworthy, a young woman about whom — after all that time — there is in the book not one single word.

No sooner however was the revised version posted than we learned that other sections of the book which dealt with the child’s earliest up-bringing were also seriously and dishonestly misleading: until then we knew only what our sister, Jac, had told us about Jim Perrin’s past, which was of course what he had chosen to tell her — and, after she died, what we later read of his ‘story’, as described in West. (The book erroneously claimed by one of his reviewers to be ‘as near autobiographical as Jim Perrin had written’… )

We are now happy to make good this omission as we realise that by the lacuna it might seem that we were acquiescing in the self-interested version written by the author; and we do not wish to give any credit to his lies, nor to allow his account to stand or remain unchallenged. Continue reading →