Jim Perrin, and given his nature perhaps understandably, was affronted that Jac seemed to side with her sons and he expected, he told her, her ‘loyalty’.

He was eloquent in conversation and a master of rhetoric, and used what we can only describe as bullying tactics; shouting, psychological ‘wrong-footing’ and the like, and by these means and by many references to ‘maturity’ and ‘responsibility’, he tried to create divisions between Jac and her children. It was so very foolish and misguided of him but we supposed that he was used to having his own way, and thought he could prevail. Continue reading →

In real terms, the happy time our sister spent with Jim Perrin was not long, since that first meeting on the 29th October in 2002. Jac and he didn’t live together during the first few months, until he moved to her house and had the caravan delivered. By September 2003, as he himself wrote to her later, ‘things had begun to go wrong’. Even so he sold his house and accomplished the move. They had not shared their living accommodation for any significant length of time or been in continuous contact: and yet he had the nerve to write, after she died:  ‘Jacquetta — my lover, wife and friend of forty years’! (ref. p.14 West) — a truly outstanding example of Jim Perrin’s utterly shameless dissimulation: the lies this man tells are extraordinary.

Early in the relationship he had written reams of letters to her, thick packages would arrive at her home virtually daily; she wondered — to us — how he had the time to write them in view of all his literary commitments, and she found it a chore to read them. We have them now and, as we will show, they ooze malice, pretentiousness and the will to dominate.

When he moved there it was to be a new beginning and it was in this spirit that he tackled the changes he made. Many pieces of her furniture were removed. Beds, sofa and armchairs were taken to the tip or even burnt. He replaced them with those that he brought from his former house. Her books and family bric-a-brac were relegated to the barn and some new carpet was laid. This was truly the ‘new broom sweeping clean’ as Jim Perrin took control of her home. Continue reading →

By the end of the sixteen year relationship which we described earlier, strains were becoming apparent and although Jac and her partner were still together and still working together, there seemed to be little hope that matters could improve.

It was now that Jim Perrin came into our sister’s life. With our knowledge of all that happened to her later — ‘Hindsight…’, as they say, — we find it difficult to write of this period but we shall be scrupulously fair.

At the outset Jac, with her eldest son, went to a book reading in Llangollen where she knew that Jim Perrin would be. Afterwards she told us about it, and explained that they had known each other briefly and intermittently, when she lived in Liverpool; how they had met occasionally, as the partner with whom she then lived was also a climber, and that they had sometimes come across each other in North Wales. Continue reading →