Thread 12: 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
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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 eleven 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.
Will our life-size cardboard cut-out Simon Armitage keep his head?
NB Timeline coming in the first posts of this thread for reference.

It was (yet another) lie by Sally Walker.

It's explained in the article why he supposedly has the nickname Moth, and this explanation removes the possibility that the interviewer wrote Ray by mistake.

The email was in a copy of the Big Issue online, I will find a link

6 May 2017

https://www.bigissue.com/culture/film/the-salt-path-raynor-winn-gillian-anderson-jason-isaacs-interview/

Blimey, these threads don't hang about! 20 pages already on T12 and I only looked away for 12 hours 😉Huge thanks to @DisappointedReader for the new thread and to @FurryHappyKittens for posting the chronology & pics. And to @Choux for the links to the latest Observer articles and everyone else the interesting discussion. The mention of cricket reminds me of the first trip DH and I made up to N Wales before we'd moved here, as it was the latter part of the 2005 Ashes series. We didn't miss a match via TMS, so agree that for a cricket fan, listening to the final match only after the series has been decided just doesn't ring true at all. But then it just reinforces my now determined opinion that pretty much all of TSP is embellished bollox. I haven't read the others and am not likely to now given everyone else's comments

Reading that article with John just made me crosser and crosser about the 'walk yourself fitter on noodles' nonsense. Poor man. I don't think there was ever a diagnosis in 2013. I agree with others that it's more likely that the events of 2015 have been retrofitted backwards to make a better story. And also agree on the projection. If you're constantly lying about yourself and looking for ways to grift off others, then of course everyone else will be up to the same game in your view.

It's interesting to me that it's the Observer which has broken this story, because it's the paper likely to have most impact with it. The target audience for TSP are more likely to be Obs/Guardian readers, so it's much harder for that readership to dismiss it as tabloid filth or the Daily Mail having a potshot.

Have joined MN as an 80+ grandad - hope that's OmhoK - so I can now not only read TSP comments but perhaps also respond.
Was born and brought up in Minehead so have walked parts, very short parts, of some of the coastal footpaths which became "joined up" to form the SWCP. Have also read the first 2 books having received TSP as a present from a family friend who knows I don't read novels, so I now feel we were both deceived! Have also seen the film which brought back memories. (But I'm sure I would have found the story very strange had I not first read the book.)
My wife and I walked the first mile up from the harbour at Minehead recently, as we were trying to find Burgundy Chapel - which is 1/2 mile further on from where the SWCP takes a sharp left turn and heads upwards over North Hill - then drops down to Bossington, the setting for the cream tea episode.
Anyway, what annoys me the most is that TSP is still being promoted as a true story when i.m.h.o. it (and the sequels) appear highly likely to be in reality 70% to 80% fiction.

i agree, I can’t imagine Penguin knew a crime was the reason that led to them losing the farmhouse

Contemplating the age issue having read pps, it doesn't ring true to me either that the WalkerWinnWyns would be seen as old at only 50ish and out of place on the paths. I'd say that most hikers I see when I'm out on the trails are older, as are the hikers who pass through where we live.

An older family friend aged 76 still hikes regularly with some friends from her university days aged mid-70s to mid-80s. Woe betide anyone calling that lot old or making them feel unwelcome! Nobody does, by the way. However the one 90 year old has had to give up hiking with them recently and meets them in the pub instead.

I don't think Penguin contractually needed to know but they must surely be surprised. Embezzlement is a dirty word.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Just had a bit if a brain something or other. I only have an audible copy of TSP - could someone who has a kindle copy please tell me if it mentions anything about the farm tenancy.

No I don't think they would have known that either.

The tenancy stuff is only discussed in detail in TWS. That's where there is the description of the letter about the tenancy not being passed on. In TSP she talks about her parents being farmers but not more specifically about their roles in farming.

Also, they really don't look very old for their age - even one of the doctor's letters acknowledges that TW is in very good shape for (then) his early 50s. I find this one of the more puzzling aspects of the book; I can't believe that everyone kept mentioning their age, but I also can't think of a plausible reason to invent those conversations. The best I've got is: it draws attention to the author/narrator's connection with the expected readership - women reaching the age when they start being read as "old". Having aged a bit less well than RW, I've started to get used to people offering me seats on buses... But as others have said, hiking is one of the contexts in which grey hair seems to be the norm not the exception!

So. Assumptions may have been made......TWS actually says:
"It was a tenanted farm. Dad had asked what the procedure would be for the tenancy and he had received his reply. The tenancy would not pass on."

But we now strongly suspect /know that SW's uncle by marriage was the tenant. Maybe they all thought that since SW's parents were about 20 years younger than the uncle and that they were resident and working at the farm, that the farm tenancy would pass to SW's parents.

But his real name isn’t Ray, is it? Birth and marriage records are Timothy. Raynor is a family name on Sally’s side (did I read that it’s her mother’s maiden name?).

You’re absolutely correct, @YourWinter. It’s more that people on here - myself included - think that Raymoth (our nickname for RW and her husband) perhaps told the interviewer that Moth’s real name was Ray, rather than being truthful and saying his name was Timothy, to avoid the interviewer - or anyone else - doing any sleuthing that would link Raymoth to their legal names and the embezzlement.

Indeed, but they should also be scrutinising what they are selling IMO. Someone from a corporate marketing and advertising background may be less inclined to do that.

Well, contractually speaking, SW gave a false, self-exonerating reason for the house being repossessed, with the whole fiction of Moth staying close to a high-flying but perfidious childhood friend who persuaded him to invest in his business and left him liable for its debts. But I suppose her argument would be that the homelessness was the issue, not the detail of why it had happened.

I was amused by the film’s wonderfully brief acknowledgement of all that, where we get a single shot of GA and JI looking disconsolate on the courthouse steps while a devious-looking besuited Cooper dashes past and roars off in a car, without even a side glance. (I actually thought we’d get saintly Mother shaking hands with the opposition barrister, but maybe the screen writer thought it was frankly incredible…)

On their marriage certificate, Sally's father's occupation is Farm Stockman.

He wasn't a tenant farmer, as she says in her writing.

That certificate job description was fascinating. It added to my view that if SW told me it was raining, I'd open the window to check........

There is this passage:
The boy on the harbour had got under my skin. I understood his sense of them and us in the village. Growing up as the daughter of a tenant farmer on a large country estate, I didn’t have to ask him to explain who ‘He’ was. As a child watching people in the village ‘doff their caps’ to the landlord, treating him and everyone connected to him with a reverential respect, I empathized with the boy’s disdain. It was that upbringing which drove me to join socialist rallies, protest against the poll tax, protest against the American nuclear warheads at Greenham Common, protest against anything really. When my parents tried to make a match between me and a farm owner’s son, it was the anti-establishment, anti-control sense of rebellion that drove me to run as hard as I could towards Moth and his belief that freedom is the most important right we have. Mum never really forgave me for giving up the security of a life married to a man with acres, and until the day she died never accepted Moth as being worthwhile. Walking through the woods in the falling light, the damp smell of the undergrowth acidic in the air, I could almost hear her laughing at me.
‘Bet you regret it now, my girl.’ No, Mum. No, I don’t.

Oh, that’s actually a plausible thought, otherwise that whole Sad Letter and the End of My Childhood stuff makes no sense. Maybe the Winn parents thought that the uncle might be able to pass the tenancy on to whoever he wanted with the approval of the landowner and were gutted when it turned out that this wasn’t possible. It would have been a step up from herdsman to tenant farmer, too, and would make more sense of their desire for Sally to marry someone with land.

😀

I can’t see how any self-justification from her can get her out of this mess. Embezzlement being the root cause of becoming homeless changes everything. I don’t suppose many people fell for her version exactly as she told it, but it came across more as they’d made some poor business decisions and felt embarrassed about it so tried to shift responsibility for their lack of business acumen onto an old friend.

embezzlement is a total game changer though.

I don’t think that’s reasonable, though. The agent has only signed a contract to represent that author, after reading an MS that excited them and that they think they can sell. They’re not making any claims to the general public or assuring the editors they send it to that they can vouch for its truth — that’s the editor’s job if they buy it. The agent has possibly never even met the author by the time they sign him or her, and they will make no money at all from the book unless or until they sell it. Any investment in pre-enquiry rewrites, crafting a pitch letter etc is unpaid work. They’re not going to be doing research into CBD or court records.

Honestly, a bit bemused as to why this has run to 12 threads.
Books can be fiction.
Publishers aren’t required to verify.
Some people are thieves and liars.
Why is everyone so stuck on this?

Apologies, I haven’t read the thousands of posts. I only read the book recently and had so many wtf thoughts I wanted to place them somewhere:

The amount of people calling them ‘old’ to their face.
The farmhouse massage scene. If true, incredibly rude that Ray assumes her hostesses are pretty much sex workers. And why would she think her husband would go for it with her in the next room, even if, as she charmingly puts it, it was put ‘on a plate’ for him.
The random people making mysterious utterances in the kind of dialogue you would never hear in real life. ‘It’s in your blood now’ etc
The sheep dying the morning they left.
The Simon Armitage shite.
Moth declaiming Beowulf and being showered with money. Because he’s such a rebel with amazing charisma, obviously.

I’ve probably missed something but they were my main points, thanks for the vent!