I don’t go around swanking about it, I try not to. “I’ve become a different person with that book. But the reviews were staggering, and it has now sold in the millions. The first print run, in 1972, was just 2,500 copies – all Collings could afford. I used to send Elizabeth to collect it.” Eventually, he sent the pages to the small publisher Rex Collings, who took it on. I got so disappointed I couldn’t bear to take the manuscript back. He sent the manuscript out to publishers, seven of whom rejected it. And Watership Down is a real place, in Hampshire.Īt first, Adams had no idea he had written something special. Meanwhile, RM Lockley’s The Private Life of the Rabbit taught him about the animal’s characteristics. Kipling, writes Adams in an introduction to a beautifully illustrated new edition of the book, showed him that he could let his rabbits think and talk, but keep them otherwise entirely rabbity. Bigwig was based on an officer he had known in the war, a great fighter at his best when given explicit orders, while Fiver was derived from Cassandra, the figure from Greek mythology who had the power of prophecy. To create his rabbit characters, he drew from people he had met and from the world of literature. I never thought of myself as a writer until I became one.” “I was 52 when I discovered I could write.
“It was rather difficult to start with,” he says. He began writing in the evenings, and the result, an exquisitely written story about a group of young rabbits escaping from their doomed warren, won him both the Carnegie medal and the Guardian children’s prize. And I wasn’t able to sleep.”Īn Aldo Galli illustration for the new edition Photograph: PR “Yes,” says Ros, “he told us scary stories. Elizabeth is watching him chat from the sofa, as is Ros, one of his daughters. Next door, in a vast and higgledy-piggedly library, books are stacked to the ceiling. Appropriately enough, there are a few small rabbit statues under one of the tables. I can remember weeping when I was little at upsetting things that were read to me, but fortunately my mother and father were wise enough to keep going.”Īdams, 94, is ensconced in an armchair in front of the fire in his 18th-century home in Whitchurch, Hampshire, where he and his wife Elizabeth have lived for the last 30 years. Readers like to be upset, excited and bowled over. I do not believe in talking down to children. “When you’re little,” he says, “you don’t distinguish between fiction and reality. The author of Watership Down has been remembering, with some pride, how he used to petrify his children with scary stories at bedtime. R ichard Adams, no stranger to terrifying children with his tales of rabbits being snared or gassed, narrows his eyes and recites, word-perfect, a lengthy passage from an intensely creepy short story by MR James called The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral.
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