180: PAUL FOOT 2026: THE PINCH-OF-SALT PATH

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1:13So let's find out the final story shortlisted for an award this year.

1:19Chloe Hadjimatheou:Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. I'm Chloe Hedgimathoe and I work for the Observer newspaper. Okay, and what is the story that's brought you to the Paul Foote Award? So what's brought me here is the true story of the true story of The Salt Path. So this is a memoir that was sold as unflinchingly honest by Penguin, written by a woman called Raina Wynne about her and her husband, who are beset by misfortune. First, they lose their home after a close friend sort of tricks them out of it and they have it repossessed. And then the very same week, they find out that the husband, Moth, is suffering from a terminal neurological disease.

1:56Chloe Hadjimatheou:and instead of being sort of absolutely devastated by this news they take the quite extraordinary decision to walk the entire southwest coastal path of Britain 630 miles and the memoir is the story of this walk and along the way somehow the effort of walking and of being in nature makes Moth better. The symptoms of his disease reverse and at the same time Rainer discovers that her real home is with her husband and the love that they share and so this was a hugely hugely successful memoir yes a lot of homes up and down the country contain a copy of salt path i've got a copy at home um which a friend gave me and said this is a this is a really fantastic book it's a very moving true story how did it come to your attention why are we talking about this memoir in the context of the poor foot award because i got a tip off so a member of the public contacted me and said I've met this couple and I think there's something fishy going on I think you should look into them particularly I don't think he is suffering from a terminal illness I think they've over egged his illness and so I went to my editor with this and my editor said well I'm not sure this is a story it's really hard to prove whether somebody's ill or dying or not why don't you ask them and so the first thing I did was write to Raina and Moth they weren't forthcoming they wouldn't give me an interview and they wouldn't answer my questions and so then I sort of begged the observer to let me go down to Wales where they originally lived and look into the allegations a bit a bit more.

3:36What did you find when you got to Wales?

3:38Chloe Hadjimatheou:I found and I had heard rumours that she worked for an estate agent and that something had gone wrong there the relationship had broken down so I went round all the estate agents in this small town Portelli in Wales and eventually somebody said I think I know who you need to talk to a woman called Ros Hemings I think this woman worked for her husband and so I managed to track this lady down and Raina Wynne who was back then known as Sally Walker that's her legal name had indeed worked for this estate agent and after working there for seven years it seems her boss discovered a substantial amount of money had gone missing and when they looked into it it ended up being tens of thousands of pounds.

4:24Mr Hemmings had passed away by the time you got there is that right?

4:30Chloe Hadjimatheou:Yes I found his widow yeah and I found lots of other people who had also worked at the company. Okay so the story's taking on a kind of financial element as well as the the initial tip-off that you've got did it roll on further from there? It did so so then I discovered she'd been arrested she had been questioned for the day and released but then she'd fled and come down to London where she'd apparently borrowed money from a relative of her husband's used that money to pay back her employer the Hemmings family and that money had gone against her house it was a loan essentially a private mortgage and when she and her husband weren't able to pay it off over the next few years the house was repossessed which was something that they wrote about in the book it's just that the circumstances around that repossession were very very different from what Sally Walker Rainer Wynn had written in her memoir.

5:27When the story was first published it made a big impact I mean there were a lot of different elements to the story as well how long had you been working on it by that point?

5:38Chloe Hadjimatheou:So I got the tip off probably at the beginning of March and I published in July but that wasn't the end of it so at that point I had published these allegations that she'd been arrested and borrowed money and lost her house in this way and also then a lot of questions that neurologists who I'd spoken to had about his professed neurological illness the neurological illness that he claims to have been suffering with has an ex life expectancy of only about six to eight years and at that point he had claimed to have had it for 18 years right which apparently was unheard of and he had no visible symptoms what was the reaction from uh reina win and and moth when the story was printed in regard to these uh the medical allegations in particular well it's it's really funny isn't it because you do these investigations and then you send off this email i tried lots of times to engage them and i'd said let's have an off-the-record conversation can we just have a chat about this I tried the same with Penguin and not got anywhere and so eventually I sent this more formal kind of right of reply we call it with all the allegations and then I sort of had a few sleepless nights wondering what they were going to come back with and it was a really quite toothless response they basically said yes he's definitely ill without providing any real initially they didn't provide any evidence at all then she released a couple of doctor's letters again when I showed those to neurologists they said to me there's nothing in here that says that he's been diagnosed with a neurological condition there's something going on and they're investigating symptoms that they can't understand and one of the things they've thought about is this neurological condition but the fact that it's not progressing and he's been around for so long means that they've also sort of dismissed it so he hasn't been diagnosed in these letters but also overall essentially their response was this is our truth you may have come back with all these facts and allegations but our truth is that we walked the southwest coastal path as we claimed it's a very interesting story because it it's quite revealing about the nature of publishing normally non-fiction publishers don't subject everything that crosses their desk to a kind of forensic, you know, New Yorker level fax check where absolutely every detail is checked over and over.

8:06What do you make of that? Do you think that should be a requirement for publication?

8:11Chloe Hadjimatheou:I think it's impossible with memoir. And I think it would be, yeah, I think it would be a ridiculous thing to expect publishers, you know, if I say this happened in my life, how on earth are they going to go back, you know, 30, 40 years to check what happened in my childhood? I don't think you can with memoir. There's got to be quite a lot that you take on trust. But I think when big allegations are being made about things that aren't usual, are sort of miracle cures, like the idea that somebody has a terminal illness and that because they've done this extraordinary walk, suddenly they've got a miraculous recovery.

8:47Chloe Hadjimatheou:I think these are health claims that it is for the publisher to check because you know that there could be serious harm that comes from that in what way in terms of other people with this condition I mean I was contacted by an enormous number of people whose you know family members had had all sorts of neurological conditions some this particular one but it's very very rare so other people had you know similar types of neurological conditions and they felt incredibly gaslit by this book because people would say to them oh did you get your mother or your husband or you know did you get them to try and walk and they'd say well they can't walk that's the whole that's one of the symptoms of this condition you can't walk the idea that you would force them to take a walk that somebody who's extremely healthy would find challenging just was crazy for them but that's the claim that this book made.

9:42Is that why you think this story caught such a nerve? Because the reaction was very substantial?

9:47Chloe Hadjimatheou:Well, I don't think so, because it's actually a small number of people that were affected, particularly by the health claims. I think, it took me by surprise, I didn't expect it, I don't think anyone at The Observer expected it to be such a massive story. But my take on it is that in modern life, we feel like we're being lied to all the time anyway, way we feel like we're being had you know whether it's the beauty industry that's telling me that I could look like a 20 year old if I bought the right cream or whether it's our politicians lying to us we feel like we're getting it from everywhere but then you pick up a book a penguin book and you don't expect it from there so your guard's down and I think people felt really outraged I think they really felt like they'd been had and there was a lot of anger has it changed how you read non-fiction?

10:33Definitely I have to say there are these investigations that I do in

10:38Chloe Hadjimatheou:the past I've done investigations where I found professors and former diplomats have said crazy things that just aren't true and before then I'd often seen professor or you know former you know former ambassador and I'd immediately given that some trust and that's gone because of past investigations I've done and now I think that you know factual books also don't I don't afford them the kind of trust that I did before I think oh gosh that's a very depressing note there's going to be at least one more book in the salt path series is there so well that's I'm just going on what I hear from the publishers it's been written but I'm not convinced it will get published the date has now been reset for 2028 okay I don't know I think if they were going to publish it they probably would have done it already lots of people in the publishing industry said you know oh I think they will because it will be a huge success whatever it says I would have bought it if I'm being completely honest I would have probably been the first person in the bookshop to find out what she's got to say next yeah I think that Penguin is probably kicking the can down the road and they're going to quietly make it go away.

11:48But the sales of the original do seem to have held up very steadily.

11:53Chloe Hadjimatheou:Well, I think at some point there was a blip where I think I kind of helped them. I know at one point my dad called me and he said, I've just read your article in The Observer and I've gone out and bought The Salt Path. And I said, Dad, you know, this is what eBay's for. But I think a lot of people who wouldn't have ordinarily chosen a book like this were fascinated by what all the sort of all the hype was all about and so they went out and bought it and read it with a kind of critical eye are you still working on the story I know there were several follow-ups in the first place no I mean I think where I wrapped it up was when I discovered that she had she had always claimed that the salt path was a sort of accidental book and and the very first book she'd ever written and I discovered that actually she'd written a fiction book years earlier, which they had self-published her and her husband before they lost their house in Wales.

12:46Chloe Hadjimatheou:And this fiction book tells the story of a young couple who moved to Wales, who buy a house. She gets a job at an estate agent's. She's accused of stealing an enormous amount of money. She gets arrested, runs away down to London, borrows money against her house, and then the couple lose their home. That was the fiction. At that point, I sort of thought, well that brings the investigation to a nice end and that's where I've left it. So the novel she wrote seems to be based on fact and the memoir was not? Was made up yeah that's what it seems. Wow. I know it just kept giving this story. At one point it just felt like I couldn't move on from it.

13:26Chloe Hadjimatheou:Every time I felt like I'd finished another skeleton would fall out the closet and hit me around the head. Did you face any anger when the story was initially published from people who loved the story and were disappointed that you were raising questions over its truth? I think that there weren't many but there were some people who had fully bought into this persona that Sally Walker had created this Rainer Wynne and Moth who were these perpetual victims and I think they felt quite protective over them and they felt that I was attacking them I did get some people who wrote to me and said I don't care what you've revealed I love the book and I'd reply well that's great I don't want you to stop loving the book I just want you to know what the truth is if I haven't ruined it for you so much the better you know at least now you know what's fact and what's fiction so that's it for the 2026 Paul Foote Award shortlist we are soon going to have a special mini episode from the awards ceremony where we find out who has won.

14:28We'll see you then. Andy and Anna here from your new favourite podcast, No Such Thing As A Fish. Yes, we are two of the four hosts of the podcast that stuffs fascinating, amazing, weird, mad facts into your ears on a weekly basis. You got any good facts, Andy? Yes, how about this one? Anteaters have evolved on 12 separate occasions. Wow. Mysterious. Wonderful. The world really wants them to exist. What about this one? When Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House lawn for the squirrels, warning them to beware of George Bush's dogs. So there you go. If you like fascinating facts and much more besides, we are No Such Thing As A Fish.