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.

I think of Jason Issacs here too who swallowed it all ‘you were conned out of everything’. Did they have a more plausible ‘off the record’ cover story?

They might have done but if so it would have gone in the book to make it more credible.

Good grief, that’s just quite sad for this poor cafe owner and family. There’s artistic licence (such as the whole Simon Armitage thing) but this is a bit on the mean side. And the incident really does just sound made up. What are the odds that they witnessed the whole thing as described?

Not defending them at all but could it have been near Mullion but not in it or something?

Not if alleged ‘legal’ reasons why not? I think as much prep went into all this as almost the Great Escape. They were extremely convincing with an improbable story.

Exactly. such a vile portrayal of the cafe owner, I would be distraught if it was me or a family member. What struck me about that particular bit was how jarring the dialogue was. I found that throughout the TSP, all the dialogue sounds cliched and overdone.

Agree. If I read correctly owner said a man ran it briefly a good few years prior (?) Could Raymoth had done bits of the path a good decade or so earlier & kept a diary? So memories all cobbled together ?

It would great if someone who’s actually been to one of RW’s talks joins the thread. I’m wondering whether a Q and A session happens. As Oscar Burton says in that (lengthy but excellent) article, there are things which don’t ring true right from the start. I can imagine people might have innocently asked questions which we now know would have made her increasingly uncomfortable

Sorry if this has been covered before but what did Raymoth live off between the end of the walj in Oct 2014 and the start of the HND course at Plymouth Uni in Oct 2015? Presumably the tax credits ran out at some point. Wouldn't their outgoings have increased - food, electricity, wireless/broadband, council tax etc?

I think that, arguably, the implausibility in the court case could be covered under the disclaimer of some details being changed to protect other people’s privacy.

If you’ve made up something that sounds unlikely, that’s not damaging anyone, and some of what seems like total madness (Why would someone who owes you a return on your investment lend you money from the business you invested in, against your house and at a high rate of interest?) is (kind of) explicable by them being trusting, naive, ill-educated types who self-represent because they have no money to pay a lawyer and can’t get legal aid.

What I’m saying is that the legal read isn’t going to take much interest in a fictional cover story, unless it libels an identifiable real person or institution. (Note that which courthouse is left vague, whether it’s circuit or county or high etc.) ‘Cooper’ is a fiction, so can’t be libelled.

And if, as I assume, the due diligence required PRH’s legal team seeing some paperwork about the real court case, it will just show a long outstanding debt the Walkers couldn’t repay and had been stalling on for years. If the legal team asked what that debt’s origin was, it would have been easy to say ‘renovating farmhouse/barn conversion, buying French property, poor decisions ’ etc. There’s nothing to link it to the theft from the Hemmingses, as SW was not charged.

We don’t know, it’s one of the mysteries! But they may have been eligible for Jobseeker’s Allowance and I think (though may be wrong) that Anna, the woman who owns the flat in Polruan, rents to them for a small amount- I may be muddling that up with something else though. But anyway it’s possible that they got HB as well, and also that they both did bits and pieces of work.

Yes. I mean, TWS doesn’t account for this year because it implicitly deletes it. TSP ends with Moth about to go to university and his student loan due to start within a few weeks, and TWS picks up with Moth as a first year university student — so the reader assumes it all happened the way it was set to at the end of TSP. But it doesn’t. So none of the books account for the missing year because it doesn’t exist in the books’ timeline.

They could have been doing anything. I vaguely assume the offer of the Polruan flat didnt come neatly at the end of the walk, but that this was just put in for a neat conclusion. I suspect the university idea similarly, that both came much later. I imagine they were living and possibly working somewhere entirely different while SW was writing TSP, possibly staying with family.

I think they had a plan & she had a careful script but it’s interesting to see how she’d react if put on spot. Imagine she’d be a good deflector.

Have just read this excellent, thoughtful, article. He has it all spot on.

I've missed the bit about him starting an HND and not the BSc, is that proven or surmising on our parts?

I must admit when the list of courses under the horticulture umbrella was posted, I immediately thought he might have done the HND and bigged it up! So like the Walkers!

That's one of the mysteries. Also makes one wonder about the whole timeline between 2013 evicton and 2016 starting the book and what actually happened when.

I imagine if asked about the court case, she’d just say ‘I can’t talk in more detail about that to protect other people’s privacy’ or ‘I’ve been legally advised not to talk further about that’. If asked about Moth’s illness, she’d say ‘it’s up and down. We’re taking it one day at a time.’

Remember that the people attending her events were fans of her work, so highly unlikely to ask combative or searching questions about things that don’t add up. She did book events in Wales, and it doesn’t seem to have occurred even to the forthright Ros Hemmings to attend one and confront her, whether in the Q and A or afterwards.

The vast majority of people don’t read, and weren’t aware of even a very successful bestseller. The film brought it to some people’s attention, and CH’s story brought it to far more people’s attention. The various café and pub owners, and the campsite manager, that CH spoke to don’t seem to have been nursing a grievance. They didn’t know they were misrepresented till someone told them they were in a big story.

The Observer changed the name of the widow of the guy who gave Raymoth the 100,000 loan, and she does not fit any of those categories.

I've not read that book, but from what I've heard about the plot I got the suspicion that her mother's death was used mainly as a dramatic plot device to foreshadow Tim's 'inevitable' decline and pain.
That suspicion became stronger after it turned out that she actually died before his diagnosis, so in the first draft there is just this brief 'oh my god that reminds me of how my mother died' moment.
So I would be interested to hear how it comes across to you, does it seem like she is truly interested in her mother or is she just a device to express her worry about her husband?

The other main thing annoying me at the moment is Sal’s repeated insistence that she’s barely worked, when she writes that she’s putting off the task of opening up her laptop to job-hunt, as a fiftysomething with no employment record. C’mon, Sal…!

YES! That says it all really, doesn’t it?? Obviously the reader doesn’t know about her previous bookkeeping jobs but we do know she ran a holiday rent business on their property. That would have involved accountancy and bookkeeping as well as everything else you do in the hospitality business. She tries to make us believe she’s so inept and dizzy when the truth is the exact opposite, she’s very calculating and efficient. How else could she have got away with her embezzling crimes?? 😠

i agree the people who attended her events are likely to have been fans. I wasn’t meaning they’d probe with difficult questions, it was more about innocent questioning which would have been uncomfortable for RW eg if fan gushed about the miraculous walking and asked how Moth is doing now, and whether the doctors are recommending more walking. Or a fan sympathising about their ‘homelessness’ and asking more about that.

on the one hand I agree RW seems pretty steely and good at deflection. But I think she must care what people think, because otherwise why issue that mad ‘rebuttal’? I imagine her lawyers would have advised ‘say nothing’ but it seems she couldn’t cope with not responding to the observer article exposing her.

Well, it’s clear from TWS n particular that her parents were strict and old-fashioned, hated Tim from the moment they clapped eyes on him, and that she never appears to have forgiven them this. They elope and don’t tell the Winns until they’re married. She never talks about how the relationship subsequently was with her parents at all, her sister is never mentioned anywhere in any of the books, and the purpose of her mother’s deathbed in TWS seems to be twofold — to be a horrifying flash forward to imagining Tim’s demise, but also to revisit her childhood countryside. Lots of ‘child of nature’ reminiscing about rabbits and lambing and hiding in the woods, and some snide DS’s about ‘commuters’ now living in the old estate workers’ cottages.

How long did they run the holiday let business?

Yes, agree with this. There seemed to be a missing tenderness but possibly because they didn’t get on (?)

It was the cringey dialogue that stopped me read the book properly. I winced every time someone opened their mouth.