Thread 5: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

The Observer The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

Second article in the Observer
https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-whats-in-the-book-and-what-the-observer-has-found

Third item in the Observer
https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-the-truth-behind-the-blockbuster-book-video

Thread One ^www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5368194-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?^

Thread 2 Thread 2. To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet

Thread 3 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5369425-thread-3-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 4 https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5370609-thread-4-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn

This makes me think of Laurie Lee's "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning". There was no dramatic hook, just a young man leaving home. First he goes to London, then after a year or so embarks on his walk across Spain. I gather parts of it were not completey true or fictionalised to a degree, but it wasn't sold as an unflinchingly honest memoir. I agree it seems to be a modern phenomenon, perhaps to compete with dramatic story arcs most often in fictional stories and films, and indeed to help a book become optioned with a studio.

Ah, OK. It’s just that TWS has a scene where three weeks after they get back from Iceland, the apples are ripe, there’s a storm that strips the trees, and Raynor and Moth are wandering around the orchard putting a couple of undamaged apples in buckets and saying ‘What a waste’ and that they’ll never be able to get them all into the barn, just the two of them, and ‘the bulk of these will be lost’.

Then, with no explanation, we skip to a description of people from Polruan arriving and, all enthusiasm, walking into the orchards: ‘Trust, such an elusive thing, but given the slightest chance it can grow and flourish.’

There’s no description of these volunteers actually harvesting the apple crop, only a statement that ‘within days the loft of the cider barn was stacked with salvaged apples’ and ‘freshly pressed juice began to fill the barrels’. It’s not clear who is actually doing the pressing.

I mean, if local volunteers always harvest at Haye, wouldn’t ‘Sam’ have told the Walkers when they took over the tenancy ? And if they do know they have volunteers coming, why write a sad scene suggesting that it’s only the two Walkers trying to salvage the crop alone?

More poetic licence, I suppose…

We always pronounce 'tangy' to rhyme with 'mangy' - it acts as a protection from fruit juice marketing-speak.

Perhaps Sam/Bill fell out with them over what they portrayed in the TWS and then he started to question TSP, given it was his reason for offering them to rent the farm in the first place?

Yes, though it would seem deeply stupid to alienate someone who’d been moved by reading your best-selling first book to the point of offering you a farm tenancy, by giving a false, misleading or unflattering depiction of you and your farm, or whatever.

I mean, whatever about not really grasping that your first book was going to be so big, by TWS, RW must have known she was likely to have a large, invested readership, and even if she was stuck with some big lies of omission, massaged facts and rejigged timelines from the first book, you’d think you’d be clever enough be strictly truthful insofar as you can on little things. Like not needing to over-egg the pudding about it being her and Moth against the world, in cider as in life.

Is it considered Ok to just pay someone off and get them to sign an NDA like that.

I wondered that. I suppose as it was a substantial sum of money Mr Hemmings agreed to the NDA just so he could be repaid.
It was an odd thing to ask him to do.

I'm imagining each successive book was playing catch up with the real timeline in the hope by the 4th book it may have finally levelled out into finally producing a book with no lies and something resembling the true order of events.

There was a 4 year gap of lived life between the end of their walk in 2014 and the publication of TSP. Those years would have to feature in any followup book. Just seems so odd and disingenuous to blur some of those years into the cider farm narrative.

I'm wondering where this could still go... Penguin / R & M could save face by putting out a statement that the books were written during an alien abduction and that recollections may vary.

Book 5, Pulled Out of Uranus, could see them on a journey being flown 630 miles around the galaxy. I'm seeing it as a kind of prequel to TSP.

Penguin, call me!

So many names involved now (and not just the various identities Sally and Timothy have christened themselves). We could do with a character list pinned on the start of every thread.

@Daisythepussycat meant to thank you for sharing your story and glad it worked out. I'd buy the book!

You can’t publish without a sob story though - @Daisythepussycat did you lose a beloved pet in the run up?

Incidentally, I've been looking at Angela Harding's website and her artwork is beautiful. I'm already making a mental list of Christmas presents.

Judging by the popularity of this thread, I reckon you're not the only one who'd buy it! I certainly would! 😁

It's fine @Daisythepussycat can just make up some suitable disasters as long as they "reflect the emotional and spiritual journey" she went on

@Daisythepussycat Does your husband look a bit like Simon Armitage? No, I mean Martin Kemp. They're so similar. It's all so confusing.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. As long as he rocks a waistcoat and a neckerchief.

I’ve visited Polruan and Fowey many times over the years, and the claim that the land was barren with no wildlife or insects until the heroic Winns/Walkers ‘rewilded’ it is absurd. It’s idyllic, beautiful, unspoiled countryside that is a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Same, it really isn’t bleak here at all, even in midwinter!

Could be! The locals would probably have noticed that too though. I'm inclined to think any drama SW can add she does, even if it means changing timings – or making things up.

Am I the only one that found the interview with RW and Gillian Anderson on This Morning particularly awkward? As if there was some tension between them; the way they each looked at each other was just so uncomfortable. In the light of everything, I’m wondering if this was actually an early indicator..

If she'd said they'd rocked up near Delabole it might have been believable.

Thanks to you and others for confirming, this is what I thought. I don't know the area well but it's one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. I suppose "the farm was pretty nice already but we did a bit of rewilding/hedging work" isn't quite as dramatic as "Raymoth v ruined, polluted wasteland".

It is stunning. I bought a couple of her books a few years ago, based on the beautiful artwork she did for TSP. She also produces calendars and jigsaw puzzles. I have one of her jigsaw puzzles Rathlin Hares, which is lovely.

Oh I don't disagree with you there. Lovely part of the world.

Or Bugle. That's somewhere that feels quite depressed. Heart of the clay country not far from St Austell (or St Awful as I once heard - I used to live in Saltash many years ago)

That could work, except in the book it says the bailiffs arrived to change the locks. I've just re-read the first 3 chapters setting up the story and it now seems mostly fantasy.