Rabbits Against the Odds by Paul May

The book which won the Carnegie Medal in 1972 is one which should give hope to all budding authors, especially to those who have been rejected by publishers, and even more especially to those who have been rejected multiple times by both publishers—some say 7, some say 30—and agents, because that's what happened to Watership Down by Richard Adams. It was ridiculously long; it had obscure quotes from Tennyson and Malory for chapter headings and it was about a bunch of talking rabbits. Of course they rejected it. 

And then Rex Collings decided to publish the book, risking his own money in the venture, and the venture was wildly successful. Watership Down won both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Prize. It was subsequently taken on by Macmillan in the USA, translated into 18 languages, filmed and made into TV series more than once. The movie even spawned a No1 hit single in Art Garfunkel's Bright Eyes although Richard Adams hated the song. In other words, Watership Down was a phenomenon. It was also, like that other much-rejected book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, published in a parallel edition with an 'adult' cover. Interesting, then, to read what Richard Adams said about rules:

'I believe that writing is rather like chess, in that although there are certain useful rules to bear in mind, a lot of these really should be torn up at discretion. One can easily get so blinkered by the rules that one can no longer judge a book by the light of the heart. That light, of course, is what is used by children themselves . . .' (In Chosen for Children, The Library Association, 1977)

I re-read Watership Down recently and when I'd finished it seemed to me that the key to its success was in the brilliant realisation of landscape and weather. So much in the book is wildly fantastic—rabbits with a complete and complex language and mythology, rabbits with telepathic, seer-like powers—but because the action is precisely located (all the locations are real places), and because we see the landscape from a rabbit's point of view, it's somehow easier to accept that Fiver can forsee disaster and that rabbits gather round in the evenings to listen to stories. In addition, Adams created a handful of memorable characters. There is Hazel, the reluctant leader who is drawn with great subtlety and skill, and there is the battle-scarred warrior, Bigwig, who Adams based on the self-sacrificing character of Elzevir Block, the hero of Moonfleet. There is General Woundwort, the terrifying leader of the Efrafa warren, and inventor of its totalitarian regime, and finally, there is Fiver himself; the fey, unpredictable and vulnerable rabbit without whose insights (and foresights) all the rabbits would have been doomed.

Adams was open about his literary influences, and first among these was Walter de la Mare. Adams was 52 years old when Watership Down was published. He was born in 1920, and de la Mare was at his peak of popularity during the 1920s and 1930s and was thus a strong presence in Adams's childhood. Adams says of de la Mare's poems that they 'are informed throughout in the most disturbing manner by a deep sense of mankind's ultimate ignorance and insecurity. The poems are comforting because the words, sounds and rhythms are so beautiful; they possess and confer dignity; and they tell the truth.' 

I'm not sure that Adams manages to be as disturbing or as strange as Walter de la Mare, because when you set aside the rabbityness, Watership Down is really a fairly straightforward picaresque adventure story with more overtones of John Buchan than of de la Mare, despite Adams confessing that the character of Fiver owes much to the character of Nod in The Three Mulla-Mulgars. The Three Mulla-Mulgars, by the way, or The Three Royal Monkeys as it's also known, is probably one of the most influential children's books of the twentieth century, influential on children's authors I should say, and despite its sometimes difficult language is well worth a read today.

Add all this together and you have what is really a quite old-fashioned kind of book; yet another Carnegie winner which is shaped by the shadow of war. And it has its flaws. Ex-soldier Richard Adams conceived his group of rabbit survivors as a kind of military platoon, complete with mild-mannered but brave and intelligent officer type (Hazel), and gruff and grizzled NCO (Bigwig). I'm speculating here, but I can see how the plot might have developed from this. We have a group of chaps escaping disaster. Great. Jolly brave chaps too, but then, oh dear, we need the girls to dig warrens and produce babies. Disaster! What can we do? Better find some does. There you have the whole structure of the book and I suspect that having come up with such a neat plot it never crossed the author's mind to alter these fundamentals.

But imagine for a moment that this wasn't the case; that male and female rabbits had escaped together and that Adams, who relied heavily on R M Lockley's book The Private Life of the Rabbit, had not chosen to ignore Lockley's description of the matriarchal society of rabbits. Those rabbits could still have raided the farm for food. Hazel could still have been caught and freed again, and the conflict with the neighbouring warren at Efrafa could have come about in any number of ways. They might, for example, have been appalled at the way all the rabbits in Efrafa were treated, and wanted to set them all free, rather than just stealing the does. Then we wouldn't have been confronted with these rather foolish male rabbits who don't even know how to dig a hole, and female rabbits who the males only want for breeding and hole-digging. 

I've seen this kind of thing before in a Carnegie winner—you may remember Ronald Welch's Knight Crusader, which almost succeeded in ignoring women altogether. Welch was another military man, and I can't help thinking of my war-hero uncle, a lovely man who treated young women with tremendous courtesy and charm but clearly saw them primarily as home-makers, though he didn't expect them to dig holes. 

I started thinking about how many of the Carnegie winners had been influenced by the reality or the memory of WW2 and I happened to glance ahead to some of the other 1970s winners. There's The Machine Gunners, The Exeter Blitz and Thunder and Lightnings coming up soon, and on the playground in The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler the kids are still chanting rhymes about Hitler. It makes me think about time and history. From 1975 back to 1945 is only 30 years. Nowadays 30 years doesn't seem that long to me, and most, if not all, of the children's authors writing in the 1970s were old enough to be affected directly by the war and its aftermath. So it's not surprising that it finds its way so frequently into their books. But I wonder what a child makes of this, because to them thirty years is an eternity. It shocks me now to realise that, when I was born, the start of WW1 was only 40 years in the past and that's how long ago (more or less) my own daughter was born.

By a strange coincidence another book about animals in trouble was published in 1971, just a year before Watership Down and on the other side of the Atlantic. This was Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien, which won the Newbery Medal in 1972, the same year as Watership Down won the Carnegie. This book, too, deals with a group of animals whose lives and homes are threatened by human activity, but in this case the fact that the animals can think and talk is a result of human experiments on a group of rats and mice which has resulted in the rodents becoming intelligent enough to read and, more importantly, to escape. In another example of synchronicity the animals in both books are helped by a bird—a seagull named Kehaar in Watership Down and Jeremy, the crow, in Mrs Frisby. I have to say that I find Mrs Frisby a lot more fun than Watership Down.

Talking animals were not new in 1972, and it's probably not an accident that the rabbits in Watership Down tell stories about a 'trickster' rabbit called El-ahrairah, who harks back to Brer Rabbit himself, and maybe even to the Winnebago Hare myth. For me though the problem is that Richard Adams' rabbits are not really rabbits at all. They're a group of soldiers lost in enemy territory, or a group of refugees seeking a new home. They may have a rabbit 'language' and 'mythology', they may dig warrens and go out to 'silflay', but it's as humans that we recognise their characters and their interactions, in the same way that in Animal Farm the 'animals' are humans in disguise. It's a funny thing, but even though they wear clothes I feel that Beatrix Potter's rabbits are more convincing, as rabbits, than those in Watership Down, but what do I know? I'm firmly on Mr MacGregor's side of the fence after 40 years spent trying to keep them out of my vegetables.

From The Tale of Benjamin Bunny by Beatrix Potter

And all those foolish publishers and agents back in the early 1970s? 

What did they know? 

Paul May's website

The Empathy Map (Part 2) by Tess Berry-Hart

"Is a refugee someone who's had to leave their home?" asked Anna.
"Someone who seeks refuge in another country," said Papa.
"I don't think I'm quite used to being one yet," said Anna.

Extract from When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, by Judith Kerr

When I wrote the first part of The Empathy Map last month about how big business has turned empathy into a tool for selling, I'd planned a very different type of post for my Part 2.

Back then it was the middle of August, and all over Europe the biggest exodus of people from their native lands since World War II was under way. Pictures of desperate and frightened people, travelling for months and months overland in terrible conditions, were filtering through Facebook feeds. Boatloads of starving and fleeing people arrived in the beautiful Greek islands, narrowly avoiding being drowned on the way whilst Western holidaymakers reclined on the beach or complained about the view. MIGRANTS STORM CALAIS! shouted the tabloids. David Cameron talked about building a wall. Macedonia was actually building a wall. The word "refugee" was barely mentioned. Empathy was in short supply.

Along with many people, I felt so upset about the coverage and the political inertia that I got in touch with Libby Freeman, a grass-roots activist who had loaded up a van with much-needed supplies and driven over to Calais with a few friends the week before. "How can I help?" I texted her. "I'm planning to get a load of people and supplies together and go over again next month," she texted back. "Great! I'm in," I replied, before I had time to think. Libby and her friends had received so many offers of help that they were setting up a Facebook group called Calais Action and were putting out calls to collect clothes and shoes for people in the camps. I became the West London collector for Calais Action, and posted on local community Facebook groups asking for donations. I received some grateful replies and promises. Going to be a busy week, I thought.

Then I went away for the Bank Holiday in Somerset. Phone coverage was patchy, so I switched my phone off and went Facebook-free for a couple of days. When I eventually logged back on, I had nearly 100 new private messages. People were frantically messaging me from all over London - "I'm so glad to see your group! I have clothes! What do you need?" My phone was full of texts, my email rammed. There was even wild talk of rallies in London and Calais to show solidarity with migrants, an initiative unthinkable only a week ago. When I got back home, there was a huge pile of plastic bags on my doorstep, overspilling with clothes and shoes.

What? How!

Then I saw the headlines - and it clicked. In the awful photos of drowned children on a Turkish beach, Britain had found its empathy.

Migrant:A person who moves from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions.(ODD)

Refugee: A person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster

The words we use to describe something are important as they can skew our perception and understanding of a situation. Take the word "migrant" - in the hands of the right-wing press it became loaded and symbolic of a particular menace; a hooded, dark skinned man, probably a member of Isis or some such, camping in Calais and breaking into lorries to come into Britain and steal our jobs and benefits. Words make us see "a migrant" as “the other” – someone who threatens us, threatens our secure livelihoods, because of ... what? The realisation that the world is not as safe as we would like it to be? That if the genetic chips had been spilled any other way then our lives would not be composed of lattes and Netflix and clean roads - and that we might be in their shoes?

When Al Jazeera refused to use the word "migrant" and instead reported on "refugees" it changed the narrative. Everybody knows what refugees are - the word was picked up immediately by much of the media and it triggered reserves of empathy towards people seeking refuge in another country.

But how are we to instil empathy in our children? The second way of building empathy, as I talked about in Part 1 of the Empathy Map, is reading stories. Studies show that children who read novels are more empathetic, quicker to visualise themselves in the shoes of a storybook character. When I was younger, some of my favourite books were about refugees and immigrants. For me the ultimate refugee/ roadtrip novel has to be Watership Down by Richard Adams, one of my favourite stories for children and adults of all time. It's the story of a group of rabbits in Sandleford whose warren is destroyed to build houses. Together they journey over the South Downs to find a new home, encountering on the way many different types of warrens and the fearsome rabbits who populate them. I defy anyone to read it and not feel empathy towards people who have been expelled from their homelands. When they finally find a warren high on the downs that they can call their own, it is a dream of every refugee who has ever travelled. “It’s not really about rabbits!” shout its supporters, and they are absolutely right. You can find similar parallels of refuge and exile in The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien.

My other childhood favourites were When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, by Judith Kerr, about her own childhood as a refugee travelling across Europe from the Nazis. Goodnight Mister Tom, about the "vacuees" - evacuated children from London during the Second World War making a new life for themselves in the countryside. The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier is another, about a group of children travelling from bombed-out Warsaw to Berlin to find their parents in the aftermath of Word War II. Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah is a more modern novel about a young boy who is brought to claim asylum in the UK during the 2000/2001 civil war in Eritrea. All of these stories are vastly different - some deal with events long ago, some are about events that have never happened or could happen - but they all contain within them the seeds of empathy that we so badly need.

Indeed, I was so influenced as a child by the ideas of flight and refuge, that the first young-adult novel I ever wrote, Escape From Genopolis, followed the fortunes of a group of refugees in the futuristic world of Genopolis where pain had ceased to exist. Those who still experienced pain were called Naturals and banished to a wilderness because in knowing pain, by extension they still had empathy. In the world of Genopolis, empathy was held as a dangerous gift, because to control people you have to dehumanise them - you must not "understand" them. Words that dehumanise people prevent us from empathising with and helping them; words which foster empathy can change the world.

And the world does appear to be changing from a month ago. Empathy is now front-page news. Libby and her friends have been interviewed by TV and newspapers about the new "grass-roots giving" which refuses to sit back and wait for politicians to take action. And what a powerful force grass-roots movements are. Just two weeks after I set up the West London branch of Calais Action, over four hundred and fifty generous and hard-working people from my local area have either contacted me with donations or volunteered to help collect, sort and pack the giant pile of supplies that I've received - crates upon crates of food, 200 large boxes of clothes and shoes, sleeping bags and tents - which now fill an entire house in a neighbouring square (the house has been also temporarily donated for a week!). This weekend the supplies will be shipped out, to be sent on to refugee camps in Hungary and northern France. A huge rally - "Refugees Welcome" - happened on the weekend in London; another one will happen in the Jungle camp in Calais itself this next Saturday 19th September. A co-ordinated volunteer programme is being set up in Calais by Calais Action and other NGOs and grass-roots groups to repair water pipes, build proper shelter and distribute the vast amount of supplies to the vast amount of people who need them.

Empathy is part of us and what makes us human; we just need to let it flourish.

Censoring a Children’s Book - John Dougherty

Censorship is a tricky area, isn’t it?

Generally speaking, it’s a Bad Thing. I fume as much as the next author when I read one of those articles about a US school board voting to remove To Kill A Mockingbird or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the library because of some imagined unsuitability. I thought the Daily Mail was a bit off with its recent suggestion that teen fiction dealing with issues like terminal illness or self-harm qualifies as “sick-lit” (and, no, I’m not going to provide a link; it’ll only encourage them to do it again).

And yet, occasionally, I’ve found myself censoring children’s books.

I don’t mean that I go through them with a marker pen deleting the ‘unsuitable bits’; and I certainly don’t mean that I remove books from my children’s book shelf, but… well, let me give you the most recent example.

I’m currently reading Watership Down with my kids (they’ve got older since the photo was taken, as have I). My daughter, now aged 10, wasn’t sure about it at first, but they both seem to be really enjoying it now. And so am I; I loved it when I was about their age, and I’m loving reading it again. But a few nights ago, I ran into a sentence that made me feel a little odd when I first read it, and makes me feel extremely odd now.

For those of you who know the book, when Hazel & his companions are in Cowslip’s warren, their hosts ask if one of them will tell a story. And the next sentence reads:

“There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight.”

When I encountered this sentence as a child - well, I can’t remember exactly how I felt, but I know it made me pause. I’m Irish - Northern Irish, to be specific - and I’ve never felt particularly inclined to physical violence. Yet here it was, in a book - a terrific book, at that: just an aside, here’s something we all know about Irishmen. They’re violent. Why on earth should the author say that?

So it made me a bit uneasy then. It makes me more uneasy now, not least because in my first proper job - in England - I worked with a colleague who was convinced that Ireland, and especially Northern Ireland, was a horrible violent place. A lot of our clients were troubled young men, but my colleague took it as read that being Irish - or, in the case of one client, merely having an Irish father - would mean a particular predisposition towards violence. It was a dreadful belief to find in someone who was generally thoughtful and intelligent, and in the end it rather poisoned our working relationship.

So the sentence I’ve quoted above is, for me, problematic - as problematic as would be a sentence suggesting that Jewish people are prone to parsimony or black people to idleness. But I’d forgotten about it until… well, until I reached it.

If either child had been leaning on my shoulder, silently reading along with me, as they sometimes do, I’d have had no option. But it so happened that they were reclining at opposite ends of the sofa with their feet on my lap. Which gave me a choice, and a second in which to make it.

I went for the easy option. I censored. I read the second half of the sentence as “no rabbit can refuse to tell a story” and read on.

Did I do the right thing? I don’t know. Perhaps I passed up an opportunity to talk about prejudice. My children are sensible enough to question this sort of statement. Probably both of them would say, “that’s silly’; my son, now at secondary school and becoming more interested in societal issues, might say, “that’s racist, isn’t it?”

And to be honest, I still don’t know quite why I did it, or even for whose benefit it was - theirs, or mine.

What would you have done?


John's website is at www.visitingauthor.com.
He's on twitter as @JohnDougherty8

His most recent books include:

Finn MacCool and the Giant's Causeway - a retelling for the Oxford Reading Tree
Bansi O'Hara and the Edges of Hallowe'en
Zeus Sorts It Out - "A sizzling comedy... a blast for 7+" , and one of The Times' Children's Books of 2011, as chosen by Amanda Craig