Watership Down author Richard Adams: I just can’t do humans

Sunday 4 January 2015 - The Guardian

Watership Down, a story Richard Adams made up to scare his kids in the car, was rejected seven times before it became a classic. As a new illustrated edition is published, the author tells Alison Flood why he loves making children wince and weep

Bedtime chiller … Richard Adams, now 94, at home in Hampshire. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian

Alison Flood

• dams, 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. The author of Watership Down has been remembering, with some pride, how he used to petrify his children with scary stories at bedtime. “When you’re little,” he says, “you don’t distinguish between fiction and reality. It’s all reality. And thank goodness for that. I do not believe in talking down to children. Readers like to be upset, excited and bowled over. 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.”

Adams, 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. Appropriately enough, there are a few small rabbit statues under one of the tables. Next door, in a vast and higgledy-piggedly library, books are stacked to the ceiling. Elizabeth is watching him chat from the sofa, as is Ros, one of his daughters. “Yes,” says Ros, “he told us scary stories. And I wasn’t able to sleep.”

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