Tag Archives: The True Relationship

Jac’s accident at Jim Perrin’s house

scan20091We referred earlier to the accident which our sister had at Jim Perrin’s house in July 2003. This was certainly a pivotal point in her relationship with him. She described it to us shortly after it had happened and as we said: ‘Undoubtedly this injury to her ribs was extremely serious’.

We have wondered ever since why Jim Perrin, as a responsible adult, did not seek medical help for her: he had been a climber with presumably at least some rudimentary knowledge of impact damage. Is he medically trained? For all he knew her lung could have been punctured; she could have sustained other internal injuries. Surely, if she was as seriously hurt as he claimed in his book he should at least have asked for a paramedic, to assess and advise her. Continue reading →

Our response To Sir Andrew Motion’s review of ‘West’

This was the second of two comments which we originally posted on the The Independent site, following a review by Stevie Davies, 23/07/2010* — and, as before, we have decided to transfer it to our own site to achieve maximum coverage:

‘We have said previously of our sister Jac: ‘The dead have no right of reply,’ ref. our comment on The Guardian thread, 05/08/2010, and therefore we are trying whenever possible to set the record straight. Our dilemma is in part illustrated by what Sir Andrew Motion says of her in his Guardian review of West, 24/07/2010:  ‘The full power of the Jacquetta story… the more we learn about her…’  when in fact hardly anything of her true ‘self’ can be learned from this book — Jim Perrin’s account is so frequently fraudulent.’

Although by writing in this way we may seem unsympathetic to Jim Perrin it is because we know the truth; we know how it was, and this really is the point.  Our sister is used — she is (that is her mythologised relationship and her too early death) mainly the raison d’être for this literary work. Sir Andrew Motion’s astute comment: The stylistic overload with which she is associated…’ — simply cannot be equalled by anyone! Continue reading →

Jim Perrin claims he is ‘haunted’

On page 58 of West the author writes: ‘She was the phantom that haunted my every attempt at relationships.  And I was hers.’

Obviously we cannot speak of Jim Perrin’s many previous partners, although our hearts go out to all those other women in his life whom he dismisses with such a sweeping stroke; and to his children who may, in the future, read or hear how little their mothers were regarded by their father. However we can say, and with absolute certainty, that our sister was never haunted by a Jim Perrin ‘phantom’.

In our earlier posts we have shown how genuinely happy Jac’s life had been, in all its phases; fulfilling, productive and contented. Jim Perrin’s name was never, ever, mentioned. He was, in her own words when she was telling us about him years later, someone she had known ‘briefly’, ‘intermittently’ and ‘occasionally’ in the days when she was living with her partner. She did not deny having met him — but she explained that it was because he had sometimes climbed when and where her ‘first love’ had, in Wales, and when she had accompanied him she had, on occasion, seen Jim Perrin in that climbing milieu, although the two men never climbed together. And there was no question whatever that she was ‘haunted’ as Jim Perrin described in the passage quoted above.  Continue reading →