Thread 9: 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 ...

2nd Observer https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-whats-in-the-book-and-what-the-observer-has-found

3rd Observer https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-the-truth-behind-the-blockbuster-book-video

4th Observer ‘I felt I was being gaslit’ – the landlord who helped Ray...

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husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

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Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn

New posters welcome. It would be helpful to read at least the four Observer items above before posting.

To all - Please be extremely cautious when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no direct connection to the story, and around the understandable health speculations, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Please do not engage with visitors who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail. Avoid @'ing and quoting them as this will only encourage them back to the threads.

We have done amazingly well together - in the main that is, not mentioning any names but you know who you are! - for eight threads so far. I can't be on the threads as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion ticking along in a healthy and civil fashion is very welcome.

No saltiness. Keep to the path. Thank you.

I don't think Enid Blyton hated children.

She had a difficult relationship with her younger daughter*; but she put a lot of energy into meeting children and talking to them, so I don't think you could say she hated children.

*Her younger daughter wrote a tell-all book about her childhood, however her older daughter disputed it, talking about a "perfect" childhood.

Good sleuthing! I wonder if the sister is ‘Polly’. It would fit, if we accept that Raynor’s description of her farm as being somewhere they had no connection to was just intended to obfuscate any link to family members. (As the reader might legitimately wonder why, if a sibling was happy to put them up for the guts of a year, she didn’t make the same offer two months earlier, when apparently they literally had no options other than wild camping just after a terminal diagnosis .)

There’s also something quite sibling rivalry-ish in the way Raynor describes talking to Polly when they’re living on her farm, resenting that, whereas before they’d both had homes and farms and livestock, now ‘Polly’ has all the power and security.

Do we know where the Melton Mowbray connection comes in? The Melton Times quotes a BBC article in which Raynor says, about meeting Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, ‘It’s not what’s supposed to happen to a girl from Melton Mowbray’.

1st Addendum (amended)
Correspondents/Portfolios:
@Cakeandcheeseforever Cornwall
@AlertCat Pedantry
@ZiggyPlaysGuitarrr Raysal Memoirs Content
@ShrinkWrappedInSeattle Drinking Games and Psychology
@gattocattivo Board Games
@Catwith69lives Pigeonniers and Hiking

2nd Addendum
Correspondents/Portfolios:
@OhEsme Psychology
@Redheadedstepchild Bond Girls, Muses and Forest Fires
@ThatFluentHedgehog Copyright, Thread Historian, Kitchen ranges, Field trips, Non-AI Resident Poet
@MarmiteWine Legacy Media
@Localres Writing, Publishing, Journalism
@Debsthegardener Property Law, Horticulture, Wild Poos, Gangsters

I know I'm still missing our other pp on France, amongst others. Let me know if I've missed you, or any of your specialisms, out or got anything wrong, so that I can find someone or something else to blame for mistakes being made. It's a busy time and the price of butter has gone up. Thank you.

I'll be Overseas Correspondent.

Have you gone on your holidays Furry?

Sally A Winn was born in Melton Mowbray registration district in 1962.

New movie based on Melton woman's moving story

Melton connection is RW and sister were born there and parents were married there. Seems they moved in early 60s to the farm near Burton.

Thank you.

@DisappointedReader, I think @FurryHappyKittens just wants to be sent on an all-expenses-paid French trip to investigate traditional pigeonnier architecture. 😀

Could be sister, though the acknowledgements in TSP could also indicate one of them is her sister, while Polly is also named.

I think @Catwith69lives got in first with that one!

I think Enid Blyton is due a fresh pair of eyes, preferably a Mumsnet relationship pair.
Husband had an affair, couldn't divorce, he spent the money, didn't work. Enid was churning out book after book, often in a fortnight as well as editing and providing content for her magazine. Plus a huge mount of branded stuff along with carrying the mental load for raising her girls.
Would have broken me.

I hope you have not just strayed off the path @Catwith69lives ? <steely look>

For what it's worth, as an Autistic woman, I also think Enid was Autistic. (And I was obsessed with her books as a child)

Enid Blyton's books saved my childhood. I owe her everything.

I don’t think her biggest fan would claim EB was faultless, though. Yes, her first husband was an unfaithful alcoholic, possibly compounded by PSTD from WW1, but she’s supposed to have been chronically unfaithful too, including several gay affairs, one of them with her daughters’ nanny. Then, after starting an affair with the man she would later marry, she persuaded her first husband to admit to being the cause of the marriage breaking down, in exchange for letting him see their daughters after the divorce. She went back on her word, blocked him from seeing them and made sure he could never get another job in publishing.

It’s not really Famous Five territory, is it?😀😱

Oh, I adored them too! But there’s no denying their author was a complex and not particularly pleasant individual.

Hi everyone. I have another discrepancy. Yesterday, I shared the article below. I was brought to it from a quote by Tim Walker within the Wikipedia article about Plas yn Rhiw. That quote is now missing from Wiki. Extract: Tim came to the garden ten years ago. He was living in Staffordshire with his wife Sally and their two young children ---- and working for the family business as a master plasterer, but had a degree in botany.
(each time I have edited out the childrens' names)

My question is: did Timoth do a Masters at Plymouth, if he already had a degree (and what about the grant)? Did he not have a degree but clinched the head gardener's job? Did people assume he was the well-qualified botanist with the same name?

1. www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northwest/outdoors/features/rhiw.shtml" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">"The life of a garden". BBC Wales. 7 September 2004. Archived from the original on 7 September 2004. Retrieved 9 July 2025.

I'm just going on the fact that there was a post the other day on the celebs who aren't as nice as you'd hoped thread about how she used to invite children from a local school for tea to promote her latest book but she wasn't very nice to them and nobody ever really wanted to go.

Her daughter was also an advisor on the drama they made about EB starring Helena Bonham Carter and it was quite brutal in its depiction. I'm aware her other daughter disputed it but disgruntled daughter must have had her reasons for saying what she did. Ultimately though we'll never really know.

She wouldn't have time for all that now, be to busy defending her choices on AIBU...

Children within the same family can have very different experiences of growing up. Look at the whole 'golden child/scapegoat' scenario.

it was a guide to architectural styles of pigeonniers in the Lot et Garonne (in French)

A likely story!

It was a Just Giving link, wasn't it, to fund your 'investigative' trip to France?

Almost! ✈️

I will be in France, briefly, but nowhere near the fabled pigeonnier!

😁

Ditto. My favourite series was The Famous Five.

I loved Kirrin Island. And the idea of old railway tunnels that shot steam out through hillsides as trains went through!

And may I say I had no truck with the extra books written by someone else.