The Day Gone By: An Autobiography

by Richard Adams

Very old are we men; Our dreams are tales Told in dim Eden By Eve’s nightingales; We wake and whisper awhile, But, the day gone by, Silence and sleep like fields Of amaranth lie. Walter de la Mare

When my father said he was going to marry Lilian Button there was a hell of a row. The Adamses and the Beadons didn’t half create. One fragment only my mother passed on to me. They said to her ‘We’ve got a Lilian already in the family, so we’re going to call you Rosie.’ If this doesn’t strike you as humiliating, reader, try it on yourself.

The superb view to the south was across the open country of ploughland, meadows and copses typical of the Berkshire-Hampshire border, stretching away four or five miles to the distant line of the Hampshire Downs - the steep escarpment formed by Cottington’s Hill, Cannon Heath Down, Watership Down and Ladle Hill.

In early childhood, I believe, awareness works on two levels at once: there is a paradox. Wonderful things are often apprehended composedly (after all, they’re tangibly there), while ordinary things can seem miraculous in a way in which they never do again.

I used to be allowed to gather up the fallen ones and float them in shallow bowls of water, and this gave me enormous pleasure. They were mine - mine! If only they had lasted a bit longer.

The upper end of the tank lay immediately below a glass pane at one end of the drawing-room, and in sunny weather the water-reflections would spangle and glitter elastically, flashing back and forth across the white ceiling above the piano. My brother played well, and to watch the dancing, glinting ceiling while he played Chopin was another of those unselfconscious delights of childhood whose worth is not realized until years afterwards.

They were indulgent, of course, because of the child they’d lost. But I wasn’t to know that. I was spoilt, really: all on account of poor Robert.

People were smelly in those days. There were no anti-perspirants and they had thick shirts and few, if any, changes of clothes. Smelly was just taken for granted.

I was socially timid, used to solitary play, and nervously uneasy among the rather reserved and self-possessed boys and girls, well equipped to fulfil the roles expected of upper middle-class children in those days. For the most part I got on badly.

Sometimes he would ask me to come with him to look at some particular shrub or group of flowers in the garden which had just come into bloom. In this way I learned by degrees the names of all the trees and flowers we grew, and would speak of them unselfconsciously.

An adult naturally sees so simple a game as a mere way of passing the time, and also knows how much luck there is in it. A child takes it seriously, for to him it is something not yet rooted in experience.

He was gathering twigs and lighting a fire under the bank - something I’d never seen anyone do before — and when we’d got it nicely going he proceeded to boil water in a somewhat old-looking tin can. When it boiled he made tea by throwing the tea leaves in, chatting all the time in a kindly manner about nothing in particular, quite unlike any of the Jims I had ever met.

Hazel harvester

One April afternoon my sister and I had been sitting silent and more or less motionless for some time, when from the field beyond a rabbit came loping up to the opposite bank of the river and without hesitation, as though it were in the habit of it, plunged in and swam across, shook itself and disappeared along our bank downstream. I know that all wild animals can swim if they’re put to it, but I have never since seen a rabbit swimming.

(I believe there is an obligation upon either the landlord or the tenant: I have been told which, but I forget.) When it becomes worn out by wind and weather it is replaced.

Gallows of Combe hill

The car - or any car, for that matter - he always called the ‘bouffam’. (In his letters to me he used to spell it ‘bougham’.) ‘I’m going into Newbury in the bouffam.’ he would announce, ‘if anyone wants to come along.’ The word was in common use throughout the family, and I have gone on using it with my own wife and children and anyone else who has become an intimate friend. I always supposed that this, too, was onomatopoeic, imitating the shaking reverberation of a car’s engine when idling, which was general during the early decades of this century.

Origin behind Watership Down’s Hrududu

My father’s narrative manner was low-keyed and undramatic, pausing and conversational. His listener was fully receptive and uncritical, tired after a long day of childhood, relaxed after supper and a bath, happy with the kind of story which was familiar and singular to himself; and with the gratification of the story-teller being there, leaning with clasped hands upon the high brass rail at the foot of the bed. You were free to ask questions and interrupt.

All my life, up to and during the Second War, we never dealt with any other butcher. Now, the shop’s long gone.

One of my early memories is of walking hand-in-hand with my mother along Bartholomew Street, when we saw coming towards us a dirty, bearded man who was pushing up the roadway a homemade handcart, a thing of soap-boxes and old pram wheels. This was full of and hung about with dead rabbits. Their back legs were tied together and as the cart rattled along their ears and poor, eye-glazed faces swung and bobbed. The man, to leave his hands free, had tied the shafts with a bit of cord under his armpits, and as he went he was very deliberately skinning a rabbit with an old knife, and tugging off the loose fur where he had got a grip.

My father was always extremely careful about money. No doubt he had to be. For instance, he himself never used toothpaste, which he considered a waste of money. Using nothing but water and a toothbrush, he succeeded in keeping his teeth into old age. Although he advised me against toothpaste (‘Only making some nasty old millionaire richer, my boy’) he didn’t actually prohibit any of us from using it. I’ve always preferred to use it myself, but I never asked him for money to buy it.

In 1946, when my father lay dying, I used to use part of the precious petrol ration to drive the Merry Mosdell the mile from the almshouse to our home, where he would shave my father in bed. The talk was the same. Like bird-song, it didn’t change.

But when you think how quickly wood burns, it still seems sad that they should have found these expeditions worth the time and trouble. They had little, if any, coal to keep in the bath. I used to feel uncomfortable and guilty to see them go by. They were hard-faced and ragged, and I knew I didn’t deserve not to be.

was your fault, Ruth,’ she said. ‘You started it.’ I didn’t think she had, but seeing which way the wind was blowing, I kept quiet.

Martin Butcher was something else. He gave most of us the willies. No one could make him out. I think he must have been one of the unhappiest people I have ever known. Solitary, subservient and silent, he kept himself apart, even in playtime. He seemed life-defeated: there was no least go in him. Invitations to join in play he would quietly refuse.

The flesh-creeping thing about him was that he so obviously hated the whole set-up and was beyond any attempt to fit in or make friends. He lived in another world, where he simply suffered. Lacking all aggression, he had no resort but to keep his head down.

As I grew older I came to realize that the world has not been the same place since that war. In what respect? In a word, a universal sense of insecurity. Before the Great War, British people for the most part trusted their leaders, were proud of their country and believed in progress. Not any more. The general notion that leaders (and experts) are not to be trusted on any account, and that catastrophe is ever at hand, goes back not to the atom bomb but to 1914—18. I absorbed it unconsciously as part of growing up.

The reason given to me by my mother was that I had become too naughty and uncontrollable. If I were the parent of an eight-year-old boy, I certainly would not give him such a negative and dispiriting reason for so big and important a step in his life, even if it were true.

The author gets sent to boarding school

I had a friend called Pawson II, who had a habit of biting the skin on the sides of his fingers - unconsciously, I’m sure. One day, when he was doing it in form, Mr Stow took a minute or two to castigate the nasty habit and point out how objectionable it was. A morning or two later, the wretched boy was doing it again, while Mr Stow was expounding Virgil. He finished the passage and then enquired conversationally, ‘Breakfast nearly over, Pawson?’

By our schoolboy code Hunter ought to have owned up too. After all, you can’t be talking to nobody, and Twid should have thought of this and pressed enquiry.

In the deepest recesses of the imagination we must expect to find ourselves often alone, separated even from our closest friends. (I was once in love with someone who hated Jane Austen.)

I myself was not moved to sexual activity, but I loved being desired by Anthony; I loved gratifying him; and I loved talking with him and being with him. He was himself of unconventional disposition; no mean poet, as well as being a fine musician and singer and a splendid actor. In short, he was excellent value and very good for me. His influence helped me enormously and I was proud to be his lover.

Traffic lights had just been introduced in Reading. My father, over thirty years a motorist, had never seen traffic lights and he ignored them, simply looking right and left as he had always been wont. It was a hair-raising run, but I never said a word.

And he proceeded to do something which none of his predecessors had got around to before. He began actually teaching me how to read for, prepare and write a historical essay.

I have always admired Kenneth Tynan’s proposition that drama consists in showing what people do when they become desperate.

At all costs, thought the British right-wingers - the appeasers, as they became known - we must avoid a repetition of the horror of 1914—18. Even Hitler couldn’t be so crazy as to want that. If we can do a deal with Hitler, there could be a strong Anglo-German alliance (plus France) and Germany will be our bulwark against the ‘Bolshies’.

I remember laughing bitterly at the cartoonist David Low’s summary: ‘The Führer gave his solemn promise that there would be no further trouble until next time.’

‘A university is a place where all the nonsense that was knocked out of you at school is gently put back in again.’

I’m afraid he cannot have been happy, although he never showed as much in his dealings with me. I myself, at nineteen, was young and foolish and full of my own doings. It honestly never once occurred to me that we had come down in the world. It may seem astonishing - even incredible - to a reader that it should not have exercised my mind that the family fortunes had failed and that my father, quite contrary to anything that ‘Dr Jarge’ could have foreseen or imagined when he left Martock for Newbury with his bride in 1910, was ending his life in failure and straitened circumstances, with the local reputation of a dried-out alcoholic.

Later, George Orwell derisively summarized the British attitude: ‘Anyway, England is always right and England always wins, so why worry?’ I won’t say we weren’t worried, but I never met anyone who thought we should sue for peace.

Although, as my sister was for ever telling me, I was too much addicted to self-dramatization, even I could hardly have over-dramatized, within myself, that summer afternoon departure from Newbury on the diesel train. It was carrying me away not only from my childhood and adolescence, never to return, but from an entire society and way of life, from everything I had experienced and come to know as familiar. The world would never be the same again.

The plain truth is that for the next year and more I did, in effect, nothing. For all military purposes I might just as well not have been there.

I understand now that no species of scorpion is actually lethal, but nevertheless the sting is dreadful.

There were about twelve or thirteen altogether, and they comprised a very strong team, much stronger than any I had yet come across. Apart from that, collectively they have importance to this book, since later, from my memory, they provided the idea for Hazel and his rabbits in Watership Down. By this I do not mean that each of Hazel’s rabbits corresponds to a particular officer in 250 Company. Certainly the idea of the wandering, endangered and interdependent band, individually different yet mutually reliant, came from my experience of the company, but out of all of us, I think, there were only two direct parallels. Hazel is John Gifford and Bigwig is Paddy Kavanagh.

Paddy was a sensationalist; by temperament entirely the public’s idea of a parachute officer; good-natured, debonair, generous, always in high spirits (I know John Gifford, despite his liking for him - you couldn’t not like Paddy - found him a bit much at times),

I’m not the first writer to have found commanding a good platoon the most fulfilling and rewarding thing they have ever had to do. Herbert Read, for a start. And Robert Graves and - a whole lot more. I wish I were back there, straight I do.

Relations with our American allies were always so precarious and the authorities were accordingly so touchy that I might easily have found myself on the mat without a parachute, as the saying went.

Given the tremendous circumstances of the time, nothing could have been more quiet and uneventful than the crossing of 1st Airborne’s ‘seaborne tail’ to Normandy and our setting up camp in the bocage a good long way behind the British lines. Not a shell, not a German fighter came our way.

Only a few old desert veterans couldn’t help feeling ambiguously and paradoxically sorry for Rommel, who had been arrested and compelled to shoot himself. We somehow felt he deserved a better end: he was too good for Hitler, really.

The adjacent fields were full of dead horses; cart-horses, most of them. Our Typhoons had destroyed all the Germans’ motorized transport, and in their retreat they had commandeered horses and carts for their gear. But the Typhoons had got them, too. They looked so pathetic and pitiable, those great, innocent beasts, their legs sticking stiffly up at all unnatural angles and foul white bubbles blown from every orifice of their bodies.

Many efforts were made at the time - by Mr Churchill, by General Montgomery, General Browning and General Urquhart (who had suffered more than almost anyone) - to represent Operation Market Garden as a victory. For the sake of public morale, they had to say something: so they said it was a triumph for the Allies. It was not. Though reflecting nothing but enormous credit on the courage and endurance of the British and American combatants, it was nevertheless a failure. The intention had been to seize the three bridges, to get them securely into the possession of 2nd Army and thus enable the Allies to cross the Rhine.

It transpired that Paddy had no next of kin: no one in the world; or no one known to 250 Company, anyway.

Bigwig died in operation market garden