Thread 17: 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)
Links to more Observer videos can be found in an early post of this new thread and here: Observer YouTube Channel: The Observer UK - YouTube
Working timeline and references: can be found in early posts of this new Thread 17.
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?
Threads 13-14: Links in the OP of Thread 15
Thread 15:Thread 15: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet
Thread 16: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5395002-thread-16-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 are welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from at least some of the Observer items above before posting.
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 sixteen 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 17. I'm as in need of smelling salts as the next person.

We seek them here, we seek them there, mumsnetters seek them everywhere: just where are the elusive How not to Dal dy Dir and On Winter Hill?

#handwavium #appropriation

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

But I suppose it’s possible she could arrive at a very similar fictional formula. Unjust reverses of fortune hit our child of nature heroine, trammelled in a conventional life. Enter a sexy eco warrior etc.

I read one of Ffyona Campbell's books. (Remember her?) I thought it was very interesting, and would have read more, had the scandal not then broken re her admitting to not having done what she claimed.

So her "achievements" weren't interesting any more. And I didn't buy or read anything more from her.

If SW did a mea culpa, maybe people would feel similarly. Maybe? I'm not sure.

I don’t want to unwittingly buy any more of her books. I think it would be a real slap in the face if Penguin agreed to publish anything new with a name change and didn’t make it clear to the consumer. I know that defeats the objective of a name change but I am miserable about feeling I can’t trust Penguin any more. Why on earth can’t she just come out with the truth now? The books have sold millions of copies and probably all of those readers were concerned about Moth. If he was misdiagnosed, now is the time to update the people who cared enough to continue buying her books. If not, then the silence will speak volumes.

@Witharelle impressive sleuthing you have done there. Could the Walkers perhaps have requested to pay it as an interest only mortgage and that’s why they had paid so little off?

@Witharelle interest only mortgages used to be more common in the 1990s and I can imagine the Walkers going for a gamble like that and putting off paying till later

Maybe I don’t understand interest only or endowment mortgages, but surely even if you only pay the interest on a £60K borrowing, it doesn’t balloon to £230K or whatever amount it ended up at? If @Witharelle is correct, even with the £100K loan they shouldn’t have been than much in debt.

@DoubtfulCat true, I’d missed that the original house cost was £40k. If we really wanted to get into it, it’s sometimes possible to access historical mortgage info on a property through the land registry www.gov.uk/search-property-information-land-registry

Also need to bear in mind that the Walkers were supplementing their income (although TW appears to have given up work) by stealing c£100k). Money was clearly going somewhere else. The mind boggles as to what the Walkers might have been saying on the applications for additional mortgage lending - especially given TW was now out of work. I am also interested as to why the liquidator of Anthony Browne's company/Christian Martin (the holder of the additional secured loan) felt it worth pursuing the Walkers for the debt eventhough the first mortgage holder would be the only one to benefit from the repossession? Clearly there was something else going on that is being kept hidden.

Do we know the name of the company owned by "Anthony Browne" that made the loan to the Walkers and then subsequently went into liquidation?

I don't want to become complacent about the embezzlement. It lies at the heart of why they lost their home and SW had some gall to write an " unflinchingly honest " book illiciting huge sympathy from her readers massaging this whole aspect in her favour. That speaks volumes. I know I'm repeating myself here 17 threads on but it really is pretty awful.

@MistMountain me neither. And I suspect this is the issue which SW feels most uncomfortable about (hence trying to make the focus of her rebuttal, Moth’s health.) When she referenced the court case she just tried to distance her involvement with Martin Hemmings by saying the case mentioned in TSP wasn’t a dispute with him. Which of course technically she could get away with because it was about defaulting on the loan she’d taken out to pay back money stolen from Martin Hemmings and thereby avoid prosecution. If she’d been convicted, it’s likely a custodial sentence would have resulted for embezzlement on that scale. So a pretty significant detail airbrushed out!

I can’t see SW publishing again, not even a mea culpa is going to cut it when you’ve shown yourself to be such an unpleasant, dishonest person - and then continued to blame others and profess innocence when you’re caught out. The ‘mistakes were made’ in the business even implies that perhaps Martin Hemmings wasn’t a good businessman and that it was his fault …. Is there no level this woman won’t stoop to in her attempt to discredit anybody and everybody to try to defend her actions?

Afternoon all. I hope you are feeling well today. I see that some of you arrived early, speed-walking like the cool, naughty ones to grab the best seats at the back of the charabanc! It looks like I've got some new names to sort out in my head and a bit of catching up to do, though thankfully not as much as in the early days!

This review of novelist Sebastian Faulks' new book makes interesting reading, including in the light of TSP debacle. Just a warning that it deals in part with themes of childhood trauma and of grief:
Fires Which Burned Brightly by Sebastian Faulks review – a grief-infused puzzle of a memoir | Autobiography and memoir | The Guardian

In this not-quite-a-memoir...
In his foreword, Faulks warns that this is going to be a “mongrel” book. It started life as a series of “essays on the things that had meant the most to me” during a career that stretched back to the raffish Fleet Street of the 1970s. Faulks’s publishers, though, had other ideas, and asked him to scrap the “least autobiographical” parts and rearrange the remainder in a chronological sequence. The result is a text that reads like a tussle, with Faulks steering away from anything that reads as memoir, while an unseen editorial hand shoves him just as firmly towards it.
Fires Which Burned Brightly: A Life in Progress by Sebastian Faulks is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£20).

This seems to be a far more honest approach.

I'm off the Zimmer frame now but still couldn't get to the front with the cool kids quickly enough, so I've plonked myself at the back next to the cider and fudge supplies (which I found behind the cutout of Our Simon)

@MistMountain @crossedlines the embezzlement still grates massively with me. It was a heck of a lot of money (well over 100K in today's value) and this wasn't a mega corporation that could take the hit, but the small business of a friend (I'm not saying theft from a big company is right in any way, but the effects are different) We then have the obfuscation re Mothtim's health, the other serious issue. Given what the naval architect nephew said on his LinkedIn, I don't think this is their first rodeo and I don't think there is any indication they are trustworthy people aside from the whole TSP debacle.

PS there's no coffee and walnut left. Sorry.

Agree on it likely not being the first rodeo. It was pointed out some while back by someone (sorry, cannot remember who!) that you don't go from zero to walloping £64k over a number of years so highly likely some nefariousness was going on previously. Excellent point about why on earth the mortgage was so high but I recall a mention somewhere that the WWs remortgaged the Welsh house to buy the place in France, so that'll have been some of it. Still doesn't explain all of it, though, especially with such a low initial purchase price. And fascinating that the application for planning permission was put in by MH, which dates their acquaintance much earlier than the point at which SW became his bookkeeper. And makes the embezzlement even worse if such a thing were possible, because he'd obviously helped them previously.

I know things were different back in the day, but I'm mildly interested in where all their money came from too. TiMoth only seems to have worked sporadically and in low paying jobs, and SalRay ditto. Yet they were allowed to remortgage? And, if they remortgaged the Welsh house to buy the French land, what on earth did they think they were going to do with it? I know it was supposedly bought to 'keep it out of the hands of developers' (and everything in my current expression says "yeah, right...") but what was the game plan? It would have needed money invested in it to either make it habitable or just to make the land not turn into an unkempt wilderness - so where did they think this money would come from?

An investment which didn’t pay off!
Was that how endowment mortgages worked? The money was supposed to grow over the term, enabling you a lump sum to repay the balance of mortgage. What wasn’t mentioned was that investments can go up or down. You were only servicing the interest, and then you still had a large bill at the end if your endowment failed to deliver.

@LetsBeSensible yes, that's right. Could the mortgage be related to the investment in Cooper's property portfolio which RW says Moth made in the early 1990s, was that investment intended to pay off the mortgage at the end? None of her narrative makes any sense to me.

Hello all, and thanks for the new thread. Reporting for duty after a phone-loss-induced absence!

Well years ago we took out one ("endowment" or "interest only" mortgage) as it seemed a good idea at the time! They were to be set up in conjunction with a "life assurance policy". On policy maturity, the sum accrued was meant to cover the capital sum borrowed. Can't remember the exact details but wife and I soon realised that it was not a good idea after all (*as there would have been a shortfall on maturity) so we somehow managed to cancel the policy and opt for the traditional capital+interest repayment mortgage.
(*As you say @LetsBeSensible the LA policy must have been linked with the stock exchange. Anyway, we saw the red light and pulled out.)
As regards the Walkers, their low earnings would surely make it impossible for them to take our a mortgage or re-mortgage using regular lenders, whether a bank or building society. Yet another mystery to solve?!

Here is an interesting (ha!) calculation: say you were to borrow £41,000 at 9% and never pay the interest but let it be added to the loan, it would increase to 230,000 after twenty years...

If true, it might go some way to explaining why SW let herself go so much in TSP about the terrible unfairness of it all, and leaned so far into the fiction that their house was repossessed because of a bad investment which somehow, mystifyingly, resulted in their house being taken off them to repay someone else's debts.

It may be that she really felt that the 'Cooper' investment was their magic ace up the sleeve to pay off their mortgage despite not really working, hence it was definitely his fault when it didn't pay out.

Things are always other people's fault, whether that's people being mean to them when they say they're homeless, or the girl in the council offices, or Polly, or the Treen campsite manager, or the people they bumped with their packs in Padstow, or nasty Chloe H, the Hemmingses, or anyone who cast doubt on Tim's diagnosis, or the people who 'poured vitriol' on her after the story or 'issued threats.

It might just be that SW was just so besotted with TW that she believed in any of schemes and his investments coming good one day. The actual reality is that TWs last gainful employment appears to have come to an end in around 2004, when the children were around 14 and 15 - and rather than making an effort to find gainful employment SW started supplementing her part time bookkeeping income my stealing, they somehow remortgaged the property despite the fall in their income and ran up numerous other debts witnessed by the CCJs, while all these funds were partly invested in the house and goodness knows what other golden egg scheme was being pushed by TW. And then of course when it all goes pear shaped, the response is to runaway from reality. I'm pretty sure that any woman, unless she was totally and idiotically besotted would have divorced TW (or any similar fantasist) well before 2013.

Perhaps the family member or “Cooper” or someone working in the City, sold them the endowment mortgage? Or similar investment to pay their mortgage.

I recall a family member selling some kind of life or savings policies in the 80s although they weren’t particularly financially minded or trained, I think he was an “insurance salesman” as such, all of our family bought one (fortunately it was a really “good” policy which is still spoken of for being a great investment!)

Hwaet! Well, fellow threadites, I bring news of a lovely coincidence which has just dropped into my inbox, namely that Plas yn Rhiw is included in this year's Cadw Open Doors month:

https://cadw.gov.wales/open-doors-plas-yn-rhiw-and-sarn-y-plas

I'm v seriously considering taking a trip to see it over the last weekend in Sept, possibly accompanied by the Wild Pooing Rovering Correspondent. I shall make sure I have plenty of fudge so I don't have to steal any, and shall not expect the tea room to supply me with hot water for an ancient tea bag dunking. Who's in? 😉

People don't drop into threads with a cheery 'Hwaet!' enough, I always feel.

I love the idea of an impromptu Mn Gathering of the Disappointed at Plas yn Rhiw. Everyone else cooing over shrubs and late-flowering roses, and the sleuths asking the tour guide endless questions about a former head gardener.