UK Edition
Secret of Watership Down creator Richard Adams' wartime love affair revealed in newly uncovered letters
In his memoirs, Richard Adams wrote movingly of his wartime love. The Watership Down author told of his sadness at splitting from Jennifer Tomkinson, saying that he could not afford to marry her.
However, a collection of newly unearthed letters provides a different perspective. They show that, far from being too poor to wed, Adams had fallen in love with another woman and proposed to her.
The collection of 90 letters is being sold by Ms Tomkinson’s son, who found them in the back of a cupboard.
She met Adams at Oxford University and they were a couple for five years before splitting in 1945, while he was serving with the Parachute Regiment. The break-up ‘hit hard’, Adams wrote in his autobiography.
However, a letter dated May 1945 reveals that he had fallen for a medic named Isolde, who worked at a military hospital.
“I realise you must have been upset and it must have been difficult for you to say all you did,” Adams writes, acknowledging that he had broken Ms Tomkinson’s heart.
To add insult to injury, he went on to say that he had proposed to Isolde but she had turned him down.
Ms Tomkinson, devastated by the news, ripped up the letter. But the pieces were later stuck back together, and form part of a collection being offered at auction for £6,000.
Richard Davie, of Nottingham-based International Autograph Auctions, said the letters covering the early years of the relationship are romantic, and include poems and sonnets. He addressed her as “my beautiful darling”.
“But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the archive is the interesting contradictions and apparent omissions it provides in comparison to the contents of Adams's autobiography published years later,” he said.
"Maybe he was being economical with the truth to protect his wife and family, thinking these letters were lost.”
Adams studied modern history at Oxford but had to break off from his studies to join the army after war broke out. He returned and graduated in 1948 before taking up a job in the civil service.
He published Watership Down in 1972, after dreaming up the story of a colony of rabbits to entertain his daughters. It has sold more than 50 million copies.