Up on the Down

Six years ago when we moved into our neglected nineteenth-century house on the edge of Hampshire’s chalk downs it was a move into two worlds. One was of damp walls, dangerously amateur wiring, a wheezing boiler and icy, see-your-own-breath bedrooms. The other was of the world that lay beyond the streaming window-panes, the sea of rolling green turf that filled the view on two sides from our position in the valley – Watership Down.

Richard Adams’s first and far and away most successful book was published in 1972 but it feels as if it’s been with us for much longer, so established is it now in the list of childhood classics. Originating in the stories Adams told his children to lighten the boredom of long car journeys, Watership Down is a simple tale, but one with epic and universal themes: an arduous and dangerous journey, near-death encounters, doubts over a self-imposed exile from a lost homeland, loss of innocence and the search for peace; a peace that would eventually be found – as it has been for us – on Watership Down. Walking along the old drover’s road to the top of the down I sometimes see and hear the rabbits that are the heroes of the book, all bustle and haste on the dark edges of the beech hangers. Carry on past coppiced woods and path verges knee-deep in cow parsley and you emerge blinking on to the bright and open down itself. This is where the rabbits’ journey comes to an end, but the journey begins with a febrile, terrifying vision. It is late springtime, five miles to the north on Sandleford Common – easily visible across farmland and copses – where the story begins. Fiver, a rabbit-prophet of sorts, sits before a man-made sign. ‘This is where it comes from!’ he tells his brother Hazel. ‘There isn’t any danger here, at this moment. But it’s coming – it’s coming. Oh, Hazel, look! The field! It’s covered with blood!’ Though he doesn’t understand the words on the sign, Fiver has sensed the death and destruction the threatened housing development will bring, and the choking gas that will be used to clear their warren. The next evening, scorned by his elders as fanciful and power-hungry, Fiver leaves the warren with Hazel and eleven other rabbits. They strike southwards, inspired by Fiver’s vision of a safe haven, green, abundant and secure, high above the fields of their ancestors. For speed and safety, most of the rabbits’ journey takes place under cover of darkness, along the edge-lands of farms and fields and in the shade of cool burrows. Danger lies in bright daylight and open ground. Before long they believe they’ve found safe haven when they meet a sleek and healthy rabbit called Cowslip. He is part of a warren that at first appears to offer abundance, goodwill and protection from elil, the rabbits’ term for the creatures that prey on them. But it’s Fiver the seer, whose ‘horrors kept him above ground all night in the rain, oblivious of old and prowling elil’, who sees the danger in the vegetable roots and scraps the nearby farmer leaves for the well-fed rabbits. He is vindicated when the redoubtable Bigwig is caught in a shiny-wired snare. Faced with a thrashing, struggling rabbit, throat half cut, the others realize the apparent safety of the warren is in fact a human trap where death lies carefully hidden. The sense of an unseen menace haunts Watership Down as it does Adams’s other works of fiction. In Watership Down it is the dark shadow of the humans, who remain largely invisible but whose works – the car, the snare, the lethal gas, the ‘white blindness’ of myxomatosis – produce a level of fear beyond that of even the stoat and the fox. That fear is tangible because Adams takes the reader inside the rabbits’ existence. He famously relied on R. M. Lockley’s book The Private Life of the Rabbit to flesh out his own observations, but he was clearly fascinated by rabbits’ fugitive lives and the ground-level world they inhabit. Fiver, Hazel, Bigwig, Dandelion and the others embody the realities of the natural world and the subtle understanding of it that is not open to humans: ‘the passing of time is something that civilized human beings have lost the power to feel. Creatures that have neither clocks nor books are alive to all manner of knowledge . . .’ A strong sense of the natural world and its potential fragility runs through Watership Down. The rabbits are threatened by both humans and their natural predators. By the time they reach Watership Down after many days and nights of travelling they are feeling the strain of prolonged insecurity and fear. And their eventual arrival proves something of a false dawn. The continued existence of the new warren depends on the presence of females, so the rabbits organize an expedition to capture some does from another warren that lies even further to the south. Leading it is the despotic General Woundwort. The final third of the book describes the rabbits’ infiltration of Woundwort’s brutal regime, the capture of the does and the General’s relentless pursuit of them back to Watership Down where a final, bloody confrontation takes place. The account of the trickery involved in this enterprise and of the long battle with General Woundwort and his violent lieutenants is a terrific piece of storytelling in which bravery, determination and guile triumph over brute strength and superior resources. But it’s in Adams’s evocation of the beauty, complexity and ‘otherness’ of nature that the magic of Watership Down lies. Here is his description of the rabbits’ first sight of the down in the last of the evening sun:

The light, full and smooth, lay like a gold rind over the turf. But down in the grass itself, between the bushes, in that thick forest trodden by the beetle, the spider and the hunting shrew, the light was like a wind that danced among them to set them scurrying and weaving. The red rays flickered in and out of the grass stems, flashing minutely on membranous wings . . .

Adams was clearly in love with the place and possessed the know-ledge of the tiny details of nature and landscape that comes from close observation, and it was clearly a place he wanted to share with his readers. Perhaps that is why he didn’t give fictional names to any of the farms, brooks, heaths, downs or copses. And just like Richard Adams, Fiver, Hazel, Bigwig and the others, we’ve been beguiled by the down and the surrounding landscape. I now know the fields where the stone curlews that arrive from the Mediterranean each spring come to nest. But I’ve also come to know the land’s features in relation to where Bigwig met the fox or where Woundwort rallied his troops. Watership Down is much more than just a children’s book or a morality tale because it has come to mean so much to so many people. I revel in friends’ reactions when we take them up to see the down. It’s as if I’ve just pointed out Egdon Heath, the Hundred Acre Wood or Barchester Cathedral. One day the book’s popularity may be the down’s saving grace, for with it Richard Adams has created a generation of readers who will surely act as conservationists for this unique place.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 54 © Colin Williams 2017