Thread 11: 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...
Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn
Thread One www.mumsnet.com/talk/amibeingunreasonable/5368194-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?
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New posters welcome. It would be helpful to read at least the four Observer items above before posting. There are currently 10 items on The Observer website The real Salt Path | The Observer

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 - from experience - this will only encourage them back to the threads. We have done amazingly well together for ten very interesting, very serious and very silly threads so far. I can't be here as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion walking along in a healthy and civil fashion is very welcome.

No saltiness. Keep to the path.

Does stolen fudge taste better?

It surprises me greatly that RW's editor did not ask her to tone down her derogatory remarks about fellow walkers. It did not affect sales in the end but so many people really did not like this as evidenced by comments here and on Amazon reviews. How the ' recoiling in horror ' about being homeless bit got past an editor belies belief. That was my moment of epiphany- when I suspected the whole thing was riddled with fabrication.

Passage from the book if that helps.

‘You look like you need a campsite more than a lobster pot. Follow the village out past the Tate, get on to the coastal path and you’ll see a campsite up the hill on the left.’ We left the path and headed up the hill, through a gate and into the final field in a long string of fields that made up a caravan and camping site above the town. ‘We can’t pay for this.’ ‘No, but it’s dark: they won’t come and check now. We can leave early.’ The tent fitted perfectly into the furthest corner of the furthest field, behind the gorse bushes. We slept as if we’d walked thirteen miles across hills and rocks, sand and tarmac. When we finally woke, we took a chance and stayed.

It doesn't say much about their exit (after staying there 2 nights without paying) but I presumed they just hiked back to the SWCP across the fields. The way they came in.

Also, it’s not all that rare. (I say this as someone with only basic knowledge of plants, but an old friend of ours used to work for a big conservation charity, and there was one orchid so rare and in demand with collectors that it got its own security detail in the four places it was known to grow during blooming period.) Irish Lady’s Tresses are far rarer.

This is a distribution map for autumn Lady’s Tresses:

https://bsbi.org/maps?taxonid=2cd4p9h.w2y

Agreed on the ‘everyone else is dashing along while we come with nature’ snark.

Can anybody remember where the cafe was where the owner apparently swore at them? Comment below from another thread which casts doubt on its veracity.

Morning all.

I've been thinking a little more about Raysal's negative descriptions, avoidance and lack of trust towards other people. One thing about paranoia is that it can be situational. One such 'situation' is living with the fear of being found out.

Another aspect is if Raysal assumes that the behaviours and motivations of others are similar to her own. This would mean that she assumes her own dishonesty and opportunism, for example, are present in the people she encounters on the walks. I remember that a pp touched on this point in a previous thread.

Keeping up a pretence is also tiring and complicated. Much easier to avoid people and to keep to a well-travelled script when you do have to converse.

I think the most telling part about their "walk" is that there's no photographic evidence to show they ever did it .
Smart phones had been around for years, we know that they had one ( shared) and how did they recharge it?

First post on here. I have not read TSP yet. These threads have made fascinating reading.

Some random musings:

Tim's father's family were all master craftsmen. Do we know anything about his wider family background? Was there old money lurking there somewhere? Sudden influxes of cash usually come either from inheritance - or criminality!

I can think of plenty of wealthy families where the sons have gone into skilled crafts, or something related to the land. Landscaping, horticulture, arboriculture etc. Where was he educated? ( apart from the landscaping query botany degree).

Where did Sally learn to write? Where did she go to school? Did she do any courses? It's quite possible of course that a voracious reader of her age could be self taught; English teaching 45 years ago produced pupils who were more competent writers than those of today, as excellent written English was seen as an essential skill.

@NoCowardSoul Best user name I have ever seen.

Yes, that was one of the things I was most struck by when I first read it. I thought it was the most interesting thing about it, tbh — though I dithered between ‘She’s just furious with everyone because of losing their home, and cant even really blame Moth, whose idea it seems to have been to invest with ‘Cooper’ because he’s just had a terminal diagnosis, so instead she’s festering with general rage and not editing that out’ or ‘She doesn’t have enough self-knowledge to understand how she’s coming across.’

And I do think that it’s one of the facets of the overwhelming majority of editors being middle-class and from comfortably-off backgrounds, that probably explains why her editor didn't say ‘Look, Raynor, this sniping about everyone just makes you look like a bitch’, because she’d be going with the ‘Don’t put words in the mouth of a homeless, marginalised person, don’t edit out their raw anger’ angle.

There are quite a few photos on SW's IG feed and in various articles which show them on the walk.

Just checking my copy now, RW says they packed a collapsible phone charger. In terms of their mobile, it’s not clear if they had a smartphone, but they definitely took photos - she says they took photos of the start of the SWCP at Minehead and the Somerset Levels, for instance.

Keeping up a pretence is also tiring and complicated. Much easier to avoid people and to keep to a well-travelled script when you do have to converse.

And if you keep a continuous narrative in your head that everyone else is nasty and you are the victim every time then presumably it makes one's own deceit easier to stomach/justify.

@Words, I only namechanged to this yesterday — I couldn’t believe it was available!

Nothing is ever said at about Tim’s family in the three books, other then a single mention of his father driving them to the station when they’re newly a couple, and a couple of references to his brother in TSP letting them use his address for forwarded mail and letting them stay while he’s on holidays, and spending Christmas with him during the winter between the two SWCP stints. They seem to have been builders. One brother moved to France, restored a chateau not far from the Walkers’ ruined French property, blogged about it, and self-published a novel.

But no evidence of particular family wealth. Time grew up in Burton on Trent and was attending what Sally refers to variously as ‘sixth form college’ and ‘college’ when they met, and he was 20 and she 18.

I think the idea that you need to be ‘taught to write’ is a very new one. Sally seems to have always wanted to publish books. She says in TWS that she used to write stories about animals as a child, and imagined herself holding a book of her own with a penguin on the spine. Chloe Hadjimatheou also thinks she self-published an autobiographical novel under the name Izzy Wyn-Thomas.

Thank you for your careful checking, as usual. I think, seeing it again, it is just obviously written afterwards. I just thought they had walked through all the other fields. But, of course, they know afterwards.

Chloe Hadjimatheou also thinks she self-published an autobiographical novel under the name Izzy Wyn-Thomas.

Do we know why she didn't publish the first novel as Sally Walker/Wynn? Why start with yet another name change?

@Divegirl65 It doesn't say much about their exit (after staying there 2 nights without paying) but I presumed they just hiked back to the SWCP across the fields. The way they came in.

When you are there 2 nights you are aware of the other campers. When I was there, there was a guy who drove his daughters to the shower block every time they wanted to go to the toilet. There were also campers who booked the same pitch, every year, the same two weeks - the one next to the tap!

She says that cafe is in Mullion Cove in Cornwall, but the owner actually swears at his colleague and not at them. He tells off his colleague for being ‘lazy’ and not clearing tables. The colleague then gives them two paninis for free, despite their protests that they didn’t order them, and then leaves his job at the cafe for good.

To be fair to her though, I actually like some of her writing - I like the way she writes dialogue and some of the description she uses too. She does seem to go a bit too far every so often though in portraying local residents as two-dimensional grass-chewing yokels or business owners as nasty mean-spirited people, which grated on me. I also wasn’t a fan of the passage where she describes a homeless man she sees in Glastonbury and seems obsessed with the idea that he not only must have been privately educated but also must have gone to Eton….

Also if this did happen then it makes no sense that they just rocked up and the cafe owner said "Fuck off" so what were they trying to steal doing to provoke such a reaction?

She says that cafe is in Mullion Cove in Cornwall, but the owner actually swears at his colleague and not at them. He tells off his colleague for being ‘lazy’ and not clearing tables. The colleague then gives them two paninis for free, despite their protests that they didn’t order them, and then leaves his job at the cafe for good.

And then the whole cafe broke into appulalse. Sounds totally not remotely feasible.

I don't remember anything in TSP about a cafe owner swearing at RayMoth. Just the passage below about a cafe owner swearing at a member of staff.

"The fog didn’t clear; grey headlands, grey sea. We sat in a busy café in Mullion Cove and ordered tea for one with two cups. Exhausted and damp, the attraction of a chair in a dry café was too strong. A man in his twenties waited tables, cleared tables, politely dealt with grumpy customers, cut cakes, swept the floor, helped old ladies to their seats, took payments. We stretched the tea, too cosy to leave. The owner came in. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? There’s two tables out there uncleared. What do I pay you for? You’re fucking lazy.’ The man cleared the tables without complaint. The owner left, followed shortly afterwards by most of the customers. It was a few minutes before closing time when the man came out of the kitchen with two paninis and put them on our table. ‘Sorry, mate, we didn’t order those.’ ‘I know, but you look like you need them. You’ll just need to eat them outside; I’m closing up.’ ‘Sorry, but we can’t afford them, we can’t take them.’ ‘Yes you can, I’m not charging you.’ ‘You can’t do that.’ ‘I can because I’m leaving. He can stuff his job.’ We sat outside; he followed us and locked the door, putting the key through the letterbox. ‘What are you going to do now?’ ‘Not sure, but there has to be more than this. I know some guys who strim the path, so I might go to Australia with them.’ ‘Good luck.’"

I assume to do with the more than slightly odd founding of Gangani Press, which has a sort of comedy list of directors, only ever publishes one book, and that book only appears in conjunction with a raffle of the Walkers house, despite that being clearly fraudulent (presented as mortgage free when it was heavily mortgaged etc). She wouldn’t want anything to link to her real identity, especially if they were unpopular locally for not paying bills.)

Mind you, it’s providential for SW that she didn’t use her real name and that the novel didn’t sell well. Otherwise, from the obviously autobiographical events visible even in the summary, it would be very clear that the Walkers had long known they were in financial trouble, and that losing the farm had been inevitable for years, not some out of the blue, unfair legal decision by an unfair judge giving them five days to leave.

😀

Yes it makes more sense for it to be this bit. (Couldn't find a cafe owner actually swearing at them.) And of course on this occasion the employee is both a heroic unappreciated hard worker and someone brave enough to walk out on an exploitative job and stick it to The Man. Are we supposed to see a parallel here? 🤔

Thanks for sharing this- a good performance too!

I've said as much before, that I find the TSP's treatment of the Minack performance weird. 'Iolanthe' has a lot that "Ray and Moth" should have taken personally: one character has to leave behind her old life, another grieves for an "untimely dead" spouse, and there's much criticism and mockery of the legal system. How does that make them feel, seeing bits of their life up there on stage? How does "Ray" feel when Iolanthe remarks on the Lord Chancellor mourning over the relics of his dead wife? We don't know; she just makes a generic remark about how pretty the singing was.

That cafe anecdote rings hollow. Helping old ladies to tables? my foot. Lazy stereotype.

I suspect the cafe owner was fed up with the desperate duo for making half a cup of tea each last forever and taking up a table when they were extremely busy - and so asked them to leave.

Maybe the lad did give them a couple of free sandwiches but as for the owner's foul mouthed tirade in front of his clientele, lad chucking the job, putting key through letterbox and going to Australia?

I really must order this book. From some of the excerpts I've read it seems to have more embroidery than the Bayeux Tapestry. Surprised editors didn't swoop on some of these things.

They’re literally the only people approved of — low-level employees being mistreated by grumpy or unreasonable employers, especially if they quit and/or give free food to our heroes, young army squaddies, the kid about to enlist, homeless people, fellow backpackers, free-spirited lifeguards living seasonally in horse boxes and sheds.

Everyone else is a ghastly, conventional, grey, effete, privileged wanker, complaining about them wild camping, refusing them water, recoiling when they say they’re homeless, calling them tramps, building extensions on their houses, eating large meals, giving them diagnosis, refusing them emergency housing etc etc.