Thread 19: 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 ...

First thread: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet

Links to threads 2-16, the other 20 Observer articles and videos to date, Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement, our timeline and sources can all be accessed in the OP and first few posts of Thread 17: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5403285-thread-17-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 18: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5422393-thread-18-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 exposé items 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 drive-by scolders 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. Over four months we have done amazingly well together for 18 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.

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

"I'll fight anyone who says I'll make it to Christmas 2021!"

It's worth rereading the interview on the Penguin website which took place in May 2021. Some gems (which as yet haven't been removed) include the following:

• She hadn’t written a word until autumn 2016, when she sat down to capture the 630-mile coastal path walk she and Moth undertook a couple of years earlier

• The couple’s situation was worsened by Moth’s brutal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration, or CBD: an incurable degenerative and chronic disease. Still, they walked – and amazing things happened. Moth’s condition improved, drug-free

• The farm was, however, a borderline ruin. The owner worked in London and had struggled to restore it as he had intended. In The Wild Silence, Winn describes the house as “oozing like a sponge, sucking up water when it was raining and squeezing it back out when it stopped”. She deals with a “town of mice” in the attic in a feat of athletics and courage that wouldn’t go amiss in a horror film. The land was worse: overworked and lifeless, Winn writes of a silent dusk, devoid of birdsong. “When we came, it was so grim,” she says.“There’s so much agricultural waste,” she continues. "The hedgerows were just dead, there was hardly any wildlife.”

• That was in late 2019. Barely 18 months later and the Georgian farmhouse is bright and beautiful, fires roaring away and late afternoon sunshine spilling in. The air is ripe with spring birdsong; the first swallows of the year appeared two weeks ago. Pheasants dart across the orchard. The trees are fruiting properly for the first time in years. The cider barns, air thick with apple-steeped wood, are in operation. Winn shows me around and my arms prickle with goosebumps. “There's a real sense of age in here,” she says. “You can really feel that generations, hundreds of years and people have walked in here.” Plans are afoot: for a new press, a place for volunteers to learn and stay on the farm. Winn and Moth have done it all, largely by themselves.

• Otherworldly piles of sticks are dotted around the orchard – a rarely seen, centuries-old technique for drying out wood he’s brought back. They’ve become such sites of ecological interest that academics from nearby universities have been studying them.

• It’s difficult to read either of Winn’s books without wondering about Moth’s condition; the good news is that the pair continue to put one foot in front of another. This spring, they will walk the length of the UK – from the top of Scotland back to their new home. *

• (*the last remark is a bit strange as in LL they apparently initially only planned to walk the Cape Wrath Trail and its only when they get to the end of the CWT at Fort William that they decide to carry on walking all the way back to Cornwall!)

Where the Salt Path led next

I still can't quite understand how Penguin published her mother's death as 3 different years. Please, is anyone able to say what TWS says about the date? All I know is they admitted the year is wrong on the cover.

I have shared, previously, how SalRay was interviewed in depth on The Grief Channel about this. So I am surprised the discrepancies were not evident.

It never made any sense sense at all that the Walkers had signed a tenancy agreement and were apparently paying rent to live in a house that was completely uninhabitable, vermin-infested and damp to the point that it took months of work to render it to a point where they could live in it. Especially when SW says that they were still paying rent on the Polruan flat over the same period.

Or do we assume that this is another bit of poetic licence, and that the house may have been a bit damp after being shut up since the departure of the previous tenants and had a few mice, just as the farm may have been overworked and had some agricultural detritus lying around, but probably wasn’t a void totally empty of wildlife?

The new tenants of Haye Farm appear to be making more of a fist of things than the Walkers!

Haye Farm Cider

TWS doesn't include any dates, but it gives the impression that it follows on almost immediately from the end of TSP -- that they moved into 'Anna's' Polruan flat immediately after their second stint on the path, and that Moth started his degree immediately. The 'narrative' starts at New Year, with Moth about to go into his second semester, and SW unable to sleep in the flat, and erecting their old TSP tent in the bedroom.

In this timeline, 'Moth was only a few days into the new term when I'd had the phonecall' about her mother being in hospital with pneumonia. That would put her mother's final illness and death in early 2015, when they did happen. (Her mother died on 22 January 2015.)

The messiness happens because SW originally included her mother's death in TSP, which supposedly takes place over August-Oct 2013 and, after the winter at 'Polly's', again between July and September 2014, when her mother was still alive.

It had been taken out of TSP by the time the published version was finalised, but was used in TWS. The date from the 'wrong' timeline appeared in some cover bumf for TWS, I believe?

If it forms a main part of the narrative, then it's hard to see how her mother's death could be a 'mistake'. Actions and influences are usually a major part of a memoir. It's like she wanted to squeeze as much grief-sympathy as she could out of her mother's death, so she kept mentioning it. Oh, poor Sal, bereaved and wandering!

I can understand mentions of the death, after all repercussions will continue and memories will keep haunting, but it seems as though she used it cynically to try to keep the reader on-side.

People don’t like being lied to and taken for fools. Worse again if they have felt empathy and compassion or are nursing their own terminally sick loved one and feel they have glimmered of hope like John Todd did. I think CH’a investigation hit the zeitgeist- we are all tired of being lied to or fed ‘alternative news’ and told the truth is ‘fake news.’ People have had enough. From Jason Isaacs to Bill Coles to myself - we fell for it. I think people are waiting for the Publisher to speak out and take some accountability. It’s very disappointing they haven’t already taken the initiative and done so. I thought more of Penguin, not any more.

Thank you so much for outlining this for me.

If I understand it, the death features in 2013, 2014 (in TSP when they move to Polruan), 2015, and, on TWS, 2016. I know I described it, last night as a moveable feast but this is barmy. And very upsetting for other relatives of SalRay's mother?

Because, although the extract in Lighted Salted Blackberries was removed, there is another reference to the late lady in TSP:

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.

For me, better written than usual certainly, disturbing. Mrs Danversesque, even. Quite deranged.

Exactly. I wonder how many people are reading the Hillsborough conclusions and thinking 'It's slightly odd that people are still talking about this.' Something being in the past doesn't mean everything is over and dealt with. People have questions and they deserve to have them answered.

I'm not saying that TSP et al is in any way on a par with Hillsborough, but using it as an illustration of how people don't forget being lied to and will continue to be angry about it when some think it should all be over and done with.

To play devil's advocate for a very brief moment (not to step on anyone's salted toes) i think much of what we are interpreting as her disdain or being aloof towards others is getting confused outside the context of the book. My impression is that these apparent snidey moments in the book are actually intended to convey their desperate homeless and penniless situation. So seeing two old ladies eating cream teas at 10:30 is going to rouse all sorts of emotions in someone who feels bitter about the world. So I think that is what SalRay was aiming for. Just it wasn't done very well or in a way that wanted me to sympathise with them.

So in summary, in the book context, I think these moments are written as fiction to feed in to Raynor as a down on her luck homeless and penniless person (just like the fudge theft incident). That's not to say real Sally doesn't hold the same disdain in real life. But we don't know where the line blurs between the semi-fictionalised Raynor character and Sally.

But if it was mere jealousy, or an attempt to highlight that they were poor and hungry - why mention the age of the eaters?

For the purposes of showing that Ray and Moth were very hungry and jealously watching people who seemed to have disposable income tucking into unnecessary amounts of food - age is irrelevant. Plus 'old people' are more likely to be on a pension and therefore this could be there only treat of the week, not all pensioners are rolling in final salary pension income (as I know to my cost).

Which is why I think it's ageism, pure and simple.

Their not there. Honestly, I annoy myself sometimes.

I don’t understand what you mean @NaughtyNoodler ?

Actually, I meant to correct myself, as she just wrote two women, and never said they were old.

Earlier in the book she wrote about some OAPs eating cream teas but only as a way to describe the overall street scene. I don't see that being particularly ageist.

Well they seem to be making cider and selling it. The website was set up in 2023 so presumably after the Walkers left.

She mentions age in lots of other places though too, not just eating. With the old always being described in a derogatory way.

Yes and the particularly unpleasant point she makes about Moth able to disarm the multi-pocketed wearing old people,

And again the three old ladies of Combe Martin: "Thief, thou art; and Liar. And shall be what thou art promised."

I'm intrigued to know whether they did just survive on packets of instant noodles with the occasional pasty and fudge bar thrown in for good measure.

I estimate that if they walked for 3 months in 2013 (Aug-Oct) and Moth was carrying a 10kg backpack, weighed 70kg and they averaged 6 miles a day, then over that period, if he had just eaten a pkt of noodles and a pasty each day he would have lost a staggering 21kg and his weight would have dropped from 70kg to 49kg! If he'd just survived on a pkt of instant noodles a day then over 3 months his weight would have dropped to 29kg. He would have been a Moth in every sense of the word!

Her editor had presumably advised taking her mother's death out of TSP, as it didn't work with the 'walking towards healing' narrative and started off questions in the reader's mind about what their relationships with their families were, why no help or a roof over their heads were forthcoming etc.

I think she was right to take it out. The whole thrust of TWS is that they were essentially alone in the world.

Insert a dying mother and not only do you have questions about how SW got to her mother's deathbed from the SWCP and where was Moth while she did so, but also why staying with her mother wasn't an option when they lost their home, where were TW's parents, did either have siblings other than TW's brother who let them use his address for post etc.

Then, after the success of TSP, when it was clear there was an appetite for answers about what happened next and a sequel, SW is up against all kinds of issues, like a lack of obvious narrative and her rearranged diagnostic timeline for TW.

In reality the medical letters in her statement suggest he was first tentatively diagnosed with CBD/S in June 2015 (after the SWCP walk), but was untroubled enough by symptoms to start a (presumably hands-on/physical) horticulture diploma or degree that autumn, which doesn't fit at all with TWS's depiction of a man whose condition is worsening daily to the point where he drives for hours in the wrong direction, and needs a 'to do' list to remind him exactly what to do.

Similarly, her mother's death, which seems to have happened in reality 'after' the events of TSP and 'before' the events depicted in TWS, is incorporated into TWS as though it's happening during Moth's second term at university, I think as a dramatic device.

TW is gone all day, SW appears not to have a job or a purpose, and there's not enough content for a book. Her mother's death allows her to physically put herself back in the midlands, use the physicality of her death to catastrophise about TW's demise, but in fact her mother's death is pretty tokenistic. It's just there so that she can talk about her childhood, her attunement to the land, and how she met TW.

I think a better name for him then is probably ‘Myth’.

That is a great name @IvyGoldenM :)

I get the feeling that it's not old people in general that Salray has prejudice against, it's regular old people, she doesn't like the pastel and beige :) They are not the same as the vibrant alternative old.
Seeing older people as exploitable, I think that is probably something they have always felt, it's not just because of their situation.

What age would the Hemmingses have been at the time when SW worked for them? Would they have counted as 'Exploitable Old With Money' (until, obviously, suddenly they weren't and were checking the books and going to the police)?

'James' the Walker uncle who lent SW the money to repay the Hemmingses was presumably older too, unless his death in 2016 was premature?

I mean, is SW doing a version of 'Lucky Boomers With Money and Houses, They Don't Know How Hard We Have It'?

Also, SW really doesn't like power, especially powerful or confident women, regardless of age -- Rachel, 'Sam's wife, is described as 'giving me a hug that held a casual, assured resilience' and as 'a woman who had the power to end a dream or fan the flames'. Not a jot of sympathy for a woman who has or has had breast cancer, only 'What is she going to do to/for me?'

Even the commissioning editor who bought TSP, and to whom she has every reason to be colossally grateful, is 'A small, beautiful woman seemed to control the room with an easy elegance'.

Her literary agent is also described in terms of her elegance and high heels. I mean, I think we're supposed to think that's terribly relatable and sympathise with SW feeling like a country cousin in London, but it just makes her sound averse to women who don't dress like her and are confident.

@HumoursofBandon I mean, I think we're supposed to think that's terribly relatable and sympathise with SW feeling like a country cousin in London, but it just makes her sound averse to women who don't dress like her and are confident.

Alternatively, she comes over as an inlander on the coast. Are we supposed to think that's terribly relatable and sympathise with SW feeling like a country cousin on the coast, but it just makes her sound averse to women who don't dress like her and are confident.

a woman in a bright yellow and blue sailing coat walked around the corner

She might even be able to sail and know a lot about the coast.