Thread 16: 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's original exposé: The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

The 14 Observer items currently available on their online 'The real Salt Path' page: The real Salt Path | The Observer

More from The Observer:
‘Hope is extinguished’: CBD patients respond to Salt Path...
The real Salt Path | The Observer (The Slow Newscast)
I will link to two more Observer videos in the first post of this thread.

The Observer YouTube Channel: The Observer UK - YouTube

Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement: Raynor Winn

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?^

Threads 2-11: Links all in the OP of Thread 12

Thread 12: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5384574-thread-12-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 13: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5386458-thread-13-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 14: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5388981-thread-14-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from at least some of the Observer items above before posting. There are currently a number of interesting items on The Observer website and linked to above.

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. Remember, even Hollywood rabbits attract the odd flea. 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 fifteen 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 our usual reasonable and respectful fashion is very welcome.

Yes, it really is Thread 16.

Keep to the path. No saltiness. May the fudge be with you.

*According to Raynor Winn

Yes, their version is they walked the whole 630 miles in two long parts. One from Minehead to Polruan over 2 months. Then a break at Polly's for 9-10 months, then a second part from Poole to Polruan, taking another couple of months, or less.

Catching up a bit but on this point
I have a strong suspicion that they retained one of the vehicles for use as a mobile base

there are references to them having a van - after RW has done the sheep shearing fleece tying work, they 'packed our things, taxed and insured the van '(p217 TSP) and early in TWS Moth has the van to drive to university 'we certainly couldn't afford the petrol needed to make the journey twice a day' (p11) So it does seem to me that, conveniently, they had the van available for use all along.

The film obviously, having no voiceover, immediately weeds out all of RE’s superciliousness/hostility towards other people like the yompers, people eating large meals, dog walkers, people doing the path too fast or in too much luxury, people who want them to pay fur ferries or a campsite or water, people staying in ‘prison like’ holiday sites, so it’s automatically way less misanthropic.

The endless references to people dragging their dogs and children away from them become one single scene when a family on the next table in a tea shop look uncomfortable when Moth says they’re homeless — and, in fairness, the scene doesn’t make the family in any way to blame. They look like they just don’t want a hard luck story from a total stranger when they’re having a cream tea. I can’t remember if Raynor shoplifts in the film. I don’t think they sneak into campsites without paying. And as well as giving away food there’s also an invented-for/film episode where they take a young homeless girl under their wing.

So I think it’s fair to say the film softens the book, removing the hostile depiction of other people and making the Winns more generous.

I also wonder what happened when SW was with her Mum for weeks in TWS because she mentions having the van. Moth doesn't seem like someone who would bus it to St Austell everyday especially since he wasn't feeling well. It's 55 minutes each way (according to Google maps).

Unless of course they weren't in Polruan when her mother died in Feb 2015 but were living in St Austell

😅😂I hardly think so!

Does TWS say she lived with her mum?

Many thanks @YarrowYarrow for the info about Blossomise and the Angela Harding illustrations of SA's book, it had somehow passed me by (and has now been purchased) Nice Insta piece too.

One of the enduring mysteries is the Grant episode. It seems so unlikely but could SW have made up the entire incident? There is a photo of SW and a tent in an orchard which purports to be at Grant's. If he does exist, why hasn't he come forward? Or is it just a literary device to insert the following passage into the narrative:

I thought about Grant's tale and why he felt driven to tell it. When you tell a story, the first person you must convince is yourself;if you can make yourself believe it's true, then everyone else will follow. Grant wanted to be the person he had created; hard done by, struggling through life's adversities, but making good on his own wits, rather the son of a wealthy father with connections

And how did they have "so much stuff"? As the bailiffs would have taken anything that was non essential for daily living or not connected with work?

It's not clear where she was staying. Her mum was hospitalised the entire time and she does mention going to her mum's cottage but may having been staying at her sister's? Looking at the time scale in TWS, she must have been there for at least 3 weeks.

Exactly. Which is why i think they emptied the house long before they were evicted.

They had 4 months notice apparently - the final court judgement was in Feb 2013 and the eviction in June/July 2013.

SW's sister lived around 2 hours away from the cottage in Dunstall.

I thoroughly recommend “Dwell” also.

Perhaps Moth inserted Grant's beauties into the manuscript, as it is a bizarre passage. Maybe even the "I felt every inch a scruffy fifty-year-old, with ragged hair and a face like a lobster".

Then SW added that paragraph about Grant in revenge, when really it's about TW 😂

I know someone suggested on a previous thread that SW’s sister had died before their mother, but I think that was speculation, wasn’t it? Based on someone with the right name and approximate dates. (Some of us had been wondering whether ‘Polly’ might have been SW’s sister — midlands sheep farm, had been close to SW when much younger, was clearly still close enough to her to have her number and know she and TW were on the path.)

If we think the sister was alive, it’s likely SW stayed with her sister while their mother was dying , or they both found somewhere to stay close to the hospital, and that her sister was just deleted, possibly at her own request, from their mother’s deathbed. Though if she’d included her sister, I suppose it would have raised questions about their closeness or lack of it, and possibly contested SW’s childhood memories.

Her sister was alive and lived(s) two hours away from Dunstall in Herefordshire. Not a farmer but countryside setting.

I certainly know which one I prefer. Even the well-travelled, folded, much-handled, sellotaped, rained on cardboard headless version of Our Simon has more going for him at this point.

Perhaps the Grant scenario was lifted and embellished from the Parsons' blog? Didn't that contain swingers?

I haven’t read TSP or any other of her books. I tried the audiobook of TSP but couldn’t even get to the point they started the walk due to a combination of her voice and the whole loss of the house not ringing true.

I usually skip over all the plot line discrepancy discussion as I haven’t read TSP so can’t contribute. But reading just now it seems the book is less ‘an unflinchingly honest true story’ and more ‘the embellished culmination of a research project of various guides and blogs which stays just the right side of plagiarism’.

After they leave Grant's, TW does say to SW that maybe Grant's assistants took him for a poet because "I look a bit like my Irish grandad". Well TW's mother was born Margaret Cecelia Browne and I suspect she was indeed born in Ireland, so that bit could be true!

I've tried to identify London based millionaire wine merchants born in the 1960s. There is one guy who sort of fits the bill (with a connection to the name Grant) but without contacting him, it's impossible to know if he is indeed the Grant who features in TSP.

We're back on the SWCP, which is tough as it's been a difficult year health wise, and because it is quite tough. Will be crossing the Helfird tomorrow, wondering if we will see Salray in the banks washing her hands Lady M style? Still loving the threads.

If we think the sister was alive, it’s likely SW stayed with her sister while their mother was dying , or they both found somewhere to stay close to the hospital, and that her sister was just deleted, possibly at her own request, from their mother’s deathbed. Though if she’d included her sister, I suppose it would have raised questions about their closeness or lack of it, and possibly contested SW’s childhood memories.

In the CH article on 3rd August, it said that they had seen a 2017 copy of the pre-publication manuscript which was about her mother's death and said "My sister and I sitting either side of her."