Costa Concordia cruise ship trial stirs memories for Walsall dancer

A dancer on board the luxury £390 million liner, he turned himself into a human climbing frame to help 16 passengers into lifeboats after the ship ran aground off the Tuscany coast.

This week five crew members were given prison sentences for their part in the tragedy in January last year which claimed 32 lives.

The trial of the captain Francesco Schettino for multiple manslaughter, abandoning the ship and causing the shipwreck is being heard separately.

Remarkably, James, now a dance teacher with his own company, does not condemn him. "Whatever he did or didn't do, it's not really my place to judge him. You can't hold a grudge," he said.

"He ran for his life. Although he was paid to stay with his ship, human nature took over. He was naturally a wimp."

Six weeks ago James, of Streetly, Walsall, was diagnosed with post traumatic stress syndrome as a result of his ordeal but he displays an extraordinary will to overcome the effects of the disaster.

Coping with day-to-day life in the immediate aftermath was 'weird', he says. "It's changed how I look at the world.

"I can suffer from high levels of stress at times and I can get quite volatile, my mum would say very volatile.

"But I've been looking into how the male mind works to try and understand my reactions to things. I've also given up working on cruise ships." He was eventually forced to leave the ship by one of the passengers.

Two months later, his sister Beki, also a dancer, was aboard the Costa Allegra when it lost power and was adrift for three days in the Indian Ocean. But James made one last cruise, leaving in August for a five-month trip around the Bahamas.

The trip was not without incident. On the first night a passenger threw himself overboard and, in the course of the journey, the ship was battered by five tropical storms and the galley caught fire.

"I think I had to do it one more time or I would have thought 'what if' for the rest of my life," he said. "When everyone was running around in a panic, I was thinking 'After the Concordia, this is nothing.' That experience alone made me know that I could physically cope but that mentally I wasn't suited to working on cruise ships. I don't like the feeling that my fate is in someone else's hands and that I don't have control over it. You have to have a certain recklessness. My sister has the mentality. I'm more chilled."

He owns up to last-minute doubts about having signed up for another sea tour.

"Before boarding at Florida, we had to wait at the docks for five hours for our bags to clear and I can remember looking up, thinking, Am I really going to do this?" In March he launched his company, Flexx Dance, based at the BOA Academy, Birmingham. He teaches mainly commercial dance but plans to run classes in Bollywood, ballet and contemporary style.

"Lots of friends will be helping to teach there. One is about to start touring with West Side Story, another has just graduated from the Urdang Adademy, one of the top dance schools and another friend is joining me from Romania next year."

He teaches 10 to 16-year-olds but from September will also take over-16s. There is also an offer of a three-month contract to work in a show in Macau, China, early next year.

Occasionally he can get nostalgic about life at sea. "I miss falling asleep in Barcelona and waking up in Rome."

These days, however, he is firmly grounded and back at the family home in Whitethorn Crescent. But with the trial in Italy expected to last into next year, he is braced for more memory flashbacks and the sometimes unwelcome opinions of others.

"When I hear people criticising the crew, I get a bit defensive. It's hard when you know the people involved. Without one of the First Officers, I wouldn't have moved to the other side of the ship and my life plan would have been completely altered. I wouldn't have been able to help save other people. It made a massive difference."