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.

But think of all the time she needed to do imaginary farm work and build the "ruin" stone by stone and write HNTDDD. She was very busy!

I think she's mentioned in the book acknowledgements.

Thank you for reminding me of the first book.

I have just sent an enquiry to:

Contact - Royal Society of Literature

It is just a form with a simple message box. I have enquired how Raynor Winn could have won the prize for a first publication?

I couldn't find any in the kindle version of TWS or TSP but then I realised that I have the TSP with JI and GA on.

I can see her trying to give her bit of a dreamer husband everything he wants (as @Vroomfondleswaistcoat describes) because she decades on can't quite believe he's with her.

I can see this too. I suspect TW did know about the embezzlement at some point before MH found out: that was a lot of extra money coming from somewhere.

TW does seem to have lied to Bill Cole about his imminent death. The nephew did say they were both pathological liars.

From TSP: I can’t thank Richenda Todd enough for her meticulous copy-editing, she was a pleasure to work with, and Angela Harding, whose artistic skills have created this beautiful cover.

TW was also the sole director of Gangani Publishing Ltd and joint director of Four Hares Ltd, suggesting a level of control in financial matters.

And she claims that all they'd earned in the year before the eviction had 'gone towards the court case, or just supporting us while we worked on it', plus having two university-going children, but then says a couple of lines later that 'as Moth had become increasingly unable to work, our income had dropped down to just the barn rental', hence them being liable for the government tax credits.

This is a bit mad. So they were both unemployed, apart from whatever cleaning was involved in the barn rental?

Even allowing for the the semi-fictional context of the courtcase, if they're representing themselves, how can that much money have been required to fight it, given that they're not paying lawyers?

And even if Moth can't work because he's ill, then surely it can't require two people to devote FT hours to fighting a court case? And if Moth can't work, surely he should have been the litigant-in-person in court and done most of whatever self-representing gruntwork was needed, leaving Raynor free to work and bring in an income?

I suppose if the reality was that her name, and probably his, too, were both mud locally (as there must have been a certain amount of knowledge of the Hemmings embezzlement etc before he signed the NDA), no one in their rights minds would hire them.

But it hadn't really occurred to me before to wonder (as we've all wondered a lot about TW is so absent from book publicity) why confident, extroverted, good speaker 'Moth' wasn't the one standing up in court, rather than shy, withdrawn 'Raynor'?

The whole sentence got cut from the acknowledgement of the TSP with the film cover ie no Richenda Todd mentioned either (obviously she was deemed to have been thanked enough in the Angela Harding covered books)

They are workshy, absolutely this, as @crossedlines said earlier. Working is for ordinary chumps like us. In TWS, when she's worried about Moth forgetting where he's going when driving to classes:
'maybe I should start taking him to uni and picking him up later? No, it was a struggle for both of us to survive on his student loan; we certainly couldn't afford the petrol needed to make the journey twice a day' (p11)
Even though RW is apparently doing nothing all day, and they're struggling, apparently working is out of the question, and so is driving TW to and from university. Her rationale in TSP was that she couldn't get a job because now Moth was terminally ill, she had to spend every precious moment with him (so why not spend time with him on the drive to university?) There's always some reason why they have to sit around letting the taxpayer pick up the slack. I don't think he ever planned to teach after graduating; I think he saw a chance to take out a loan he could avoid ever paying back and went for it.

@YarrowYarrow

"Even allowing for the the semi-fictional context of the courtcase, if they're representing themselves, how can that much money have been required to fight it, given that they're not paying lawyers?"

Good point. Why didn't they get some advice if they couldn't afford solicitors by going to Citizens Advice or similar? Some law firms have free advice sessions. Any legal advocate would tell them not to pay any money to the Hemmings if they were innocent as claimed. As for that rebuttal statement, a legal adviser would have told them not to do that.

'we certainly couldn't afford the petrol needed to make the journey twice a day'

Why didn't she get a minimum wage job in Plymouth, work during the hours Moth was at Uni and pick him up when she'd finished her shift? Cleaning, retail, school lunchtime supervisor? He could always go and study in the library hang out with the cool young kids if the hours didn't match up exactly. Two birds, one stone.

But I guess hoovering other people's houses, being on the tills at Tesco or doling out school mashed potato and beans isn't fitting for a child of nature.

But winter would be here soon; there were hardly any jobs around now: all the employers were reducing staff for the low season. I’d had no success in the summer, so I was hardly going to find anything now.

This is SW in TWS, possibly the most 'dog ate my homework' excuse for not getting a job ever.

Ditto my eyes scanned the bookshelf, searching for something to delay the moment when I had to open the laptop to spend more hours in the soul-destroying hunt for an employer who was on the lookout for an unqualified fifty-something with no employment record.

When she and Moth start talking to a group of homeless people in Truro later on, she asks

If any of you started living a normal life again, how do you think you’d be? I mean, do you think it would be hard? Not paying the bills and finding a job, not all that practical stuff. But do you think it would be hard to go inside after living outside for so long? And what about other people – do you think you’d find it easy to slip back into normality, that you’d just be able to interact with people in the same way you did before you were homeless?’

The irony is that she hasn't done any of the 'paying the bills and finding a job' practical stuff that she seems to be dismissing as the easy part of no longer being homeless. (And of course she's spent a total of probably three months under canvas.)

Predictably an almost certainly entirely fictional speech comes in reply from one of the homeless men:

[P]eople, well, you can’t trust ’em, can you? Even if they seem to be helping, you can’t trust their motives. Feels like someone always wants to know a bit more so they can find an easier way to do you over, move you on.

And, walking away, holding hands, RW opines

Trust. Such a slippery, elusive concept. Like an eel in your hands at the side of the river: release your grip for a second and it’s downstream and out of sight. You may never catch it again.

Which a therapist would have a field day with. The Walkers' problem is that people have clearly always tended to trust them too much, the Hemmingses, PRH, their devoted fans etc, rather than not enough.

RW claims that they started out using professionals but ran out of money. From TSP p9:

Our savings quickly ran out, eaten up by solicitors' fees. From then on we became litigants in person, just a number amongst the unrepresented masses, something the government had created in their thousands when they announced the legal aid reforms, leaving us with no right to free representation as our case was classed as 'too complex' to qualify for legal aid. The reform may have saved £350 million a year, but left vulnerable people with no access to justice.

Nice distraction there from this head-scratching scenario by throwing in a blast at the government and their heartless reforms. (Never thought I could be persuaded to feel a Tory government was being unfairly blamed for something... 🙃)

I absolutely concur that SW behaved appallingly. I was just trying to offer a reason for working part time when children were in secondary school - I know how hard it was for my kids to do ANYTHING without school hours here because there's no public transport and no way of getting from A to B. I wondered if that's how she started, being 'stuck' in a part time job and then unwilling to work more hours. She probably reasoned to herself that working more (or, as it appears, at all) was impossible. But she does seem to have gone 'I'm fifty nobody wants to employ me - oh well, that's that then.'

I think, like a PP, that word had travelled and it wasn't her age that was stopping her being employed but her reputation for being less than honest. Even with an NDA, people will whisper.

I managed to dig out the following interview from Feb 2019 with SW in Waterstones where she discusses 3 of her favourite books:

• Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby
• The Woman's Room by Marilyn French and
• Who said the Race was Over by Anna Birkin

Video | Facebook

In the book RW again plays the victim of the system by talking about the gov having recently removed legal aid.

No, I get that this is a real barrier for some women looking for work. I just think that, as with various other things, RW glommed onto it as a handy excuse. And possibly something that readers would identify with.

I sometimes find that I am tying myself into pretzels in an urge to be fair to everyone... I believe that SW and TW have pulled several fast ones and been chronically dishonest (I am particularly angry about the 'First Book Award' thing for what looks like NOT being her first book), but I also believe in trying to be fair and not doing a blanket condemnation!

Has this article by David Aaronovitch in early July been shared before? I think it aligns with much of what has been discussed here.

archive.ph/dphln

@YarrowYarrow The Walkers' problem is that people have clearly always tended to trust them too much, the Hemmingses, PRH, their devoted fans etc, rather than not enough.

I did feel quite shocked when Jason Isaacs said this at the TSP premiere:

"they were being shunned by many people"

I thought, I hope he doesn't mean people along the SWCP. I felt quite queasy at the thought.

😮
If that’s true, wow! Where could that have been reported? More evidence of the mean spirited nature of her. Jealousy?

Oh, to know what Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson would say now…

Gillian was obviously interested in the story but seems more detached. Whereas Jason is into the mysticism, etc....

This makes me even more glad that Simon A seems very happy to be associated publically (the nice picture and piece on his Insta where he talks about further collaboration)

Angela Harding's work stands by itself but I'm sure his support is more valuable than that of the now very dubiously regarded Salray.