Musings and mutterings on Raynor Winn's 'The Salt Path' ...

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is an extraordinary memoir, written by a clearly extraordinary woman – someone whose response to insolvency and the loss of her home was to take herself and her terminally ill husband on a 630-mile trek along the South West Coast Path, from Minehead in Somerset to Poole in Dorset, carrying only their tent and backpacks and with only £48 per week in tax credits to survive on.

It's beautifully written, and the scenery, the wildlife, the constant ebb and flow of the tides, the call of the gulls and the salty tang on the air invade the senses at every turn of the page. I'll swear I could feel the sun on my face and the sweat on my back, the ache in my shoulders and the damp, cold clothes clinging, taste salt on my tongue and hear the hiss and suck of waves on shingle even as I found myself increasingly challenged by the lackadaisical attitude of the narrator and her other half to almost every practical consideration pertaining to the choice they'd made ...

Okay, so it's a personal reaction, but one I just can't help. It's partly to do with my OCD, and partly because although I've never been homeless I have had to live hand to mouth, counting every single penny as it came and went from a weekly allowance. I just can't understand, for instance, how they could have forgotten to cancel an insurance direct debit on a home they no longer had when they knew they were going to have to survive on £48 a week, or how when the cash machine coughs up only £32.75 one week they 'didn't care where the other £16 had gone, or if the £32 should have been there at all, or that it was Tuesday when we thought it was Thursday ...[we] held the notes like precious gems'. I began to suspect it was this kind of carelessness that had got them into dire straits in the first place – what kind of hippy arrogance had made them represent themselves in court without even bothering to research the correct procedure for presenting new evidence? Could they not have borrowed the money for proper representation, or entered into a 'no win, no fee' agreement?

It seemed that whenever the reader was supposed to feel sorry for Raynor and Moth, I only succeeded in feeling annoyed. Constantly hungry, wet, tired and smelly, they encounter hostility from the public when mistaken for tramps and barely disguised disapproval whenever they admit to being homeless in conversation. But how could they 'forget' to fill up their water bottles on two occasions, so that 'the thirst overtook the hunger in a primal craving for water'? How could they have forgotten to pack sunblock, setting out at the height of summer? And maddest of all, how could they have forgotten to pack the medication prescribed specially for Moth's cortisobasal degeneration (CBD), a condition his GP had described as terminal?

Although they constantly berate themselves for their own irresponsibility ('Supid, stupid, stupid... to think we could walk this path, to not have enough money, to pretend we weren't homeless, to get the court procedure wrong, to lose the children's home' …) it's such a thin veneer of self-criticism over such a solid block of self-pity that I was unable to supply the expected contradiction, especially as their children at the time were students and still in need of a parental rock to cling to. At one stage they even forget to charge their phone – 'we'd forgotten we had it, and hadn't looked at it for days' – and when they finally do recharge it they find 'a mass of texts from the kids' … absolutely unbelievable.

And yet, and yet – there are also passages like this: 'The sun was setting, lighting the sky in late July tones of gentle southern colour. The land ahead turned blue in the falling shadows and the lagoon fell silent, birdlife fading away as the water receded … a small boat made its way back to the shore, a black shadow weaving quietly along rivulets of molten sky, disappearing as mud and stone blended together in the low rays of the last reflected light. A mist began to lift as the air turned silver and night blue, the reeds becoming dark silhouettes against the line of the pebble bank and the dimming sky.' Beautiful, vivid descriptions of coastal light and the beneficence of Nature, and of being at one with the natural world, without the tacky overlay of unnecessary possessions and artificial pursuits that most of humanity deems essential. 'We were everything we wanted to be, and everything we didn't. And we were free, free to be all those things, and stronger because of them..... This second in the millions of seconds was the only one, the only one that we could live in.'

So Raynor and Moth find something real and precious on their wanderings, and as it turns out they also find a reversal of fortune – the offer of a home, and a stay of execution for Moth as it transpires that the weight-bearing, repetitive exercise of walking over 600 miles carrying a backpack has actually halted, or at least slowed down, the CBD! 'I don't know what you're doing, but just keep doing it!' says his bemused GP – wrong-footed, like me, over the issue of prescribed medication.

So that's me told! It all works out for them, and with the success of this remarkable book, their financial security and that of their children is presumably assured! Good on them, and although I can still only view their adventure with blank incomprehension rather than the admiration and envy it's inspired in others, I can only wish them well.




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