A Love Letter to the Real English Countryside

When was the first time you really thought about death? Traditionally, it has been the family pet’s job to introduce British infants to the concept of oblivion. We’re a nation that will allow a fat spaniel martyr to live under our kitchen table in return for them one day dying and, in doing so, somehow making the future deaths of humans less weird and sad for kids. 

It’s a noble way to go, even if the performance piece really crescendoes with The Chat from Mum and Dad that follows in act II. The chat in which you are told that death comes to everyone, eventually, and it will come to them and to you and to everyone you ever meet, just as it has come to Jasper or Floppo. The chat in which you are told that death isn’t very nice but don’t worry about it too much for now; you are young and have ages left, and anyway, there might just be something after death waiting for you if you play your cards right. Which seems both an odd amount of philosophical pressure to burden a seven-year-old with, and a lie, reducing death to a destination you just kind of pull up to at some point, rather than it being an integral part of everyday life as it is lived, a threat hiding in each kiss, a promise welded in the tyre arch of every passing car, an alternate present trapped in the lining of your skin and the space between a mirror and its frame. 

This idea of death – persistent, looming, everywhere – seems more accurate, especially when the physical event of death can feel so detached, sanitised, rehearsed: something that as a species and individuals we now tend to do to ourselves, whether with cigarettes, food or despair. There’s something very “kill your own adventure” about the way most of us die today, a customised route to naught that we’re busy replicating on a global scale as we burn the walls of the world to keep away the cold. Of course, there are predatory humans out there who would love nothing more than to kill you, your family and your dog, Floppo, in cold blood right this second, but for all the gossip about paedos, jihadists and Nazis, the reality is that most of us will go through our lives without ever truly understanding the sensation of being hunted. The reality is that most of us live in some nameless subgenre of the modern Western world, a place that doesn’t offer us many opportunities to be prey to anything but ourselves.

I was nine the first time I was really forced to think about death in its proper, all-pervasive form, in the form of it chasing you through life, of a life being hunted. I was stuck indoors some grey, suburban Saturday, and on TV was Martin Rosen’s film adaptation of Watership Down, in which a gang of rabbits are forced to undertake a brutal cross-country odyssey after one of them – Fiver, a kind of sadlad seer – suffers a premonitory glimpse of the home warren being destroyed and the neighbouring fields drowning in leporine blood. The author of the original novel, Richard Adams, died on the Christmas Eve just gone, peacefully and at the grand age of 96. It’s ironic that a man who managed to last so long wrote something that has taught so many kids about the unavoidable fragility of life. The death in his book is real death, death everywhere and in everything, a shadow of life that enriches the mortal experience rather than just waiting gormlessly at the end of it.

There’s something haunting about the way idyllic country fields are rendered in the story, enduring in the mind’s eye as the film’s swirling watercolour canvas of overcast greys, mournful purple dawn mists and the muddy greens of sodden English turf. A lot has been written about this decade’s moral whitewashing of the English countryside – how it’s become a place painted polite by people looking to sell things: companies selling cider; Mumford & Sons selling records; internet dating sites selling a twee facsimile of love via Hobbit-looking ukulele dickheads; The Great British Bake Off selling dull evenings in; the Tory government selling its own authenticity through the landowner fantasy of power born-to-rule. 

All photos by Hollie Fernando

But Watership Down, which sends blood spilling across a series of fields on the Berkshire-Hampshire border, is a tonic to that. In culturally puritanical times – when the concept of “Englishness” has become a dangerous and divisive metric, and people vote for the future to resemble a halcyon past that has only ever existed in the advertising of UKIP and forces like those listed above – it’s important to remember that those fields are responsible for providing more than a bland backdrop for the “Chipping Norton set” to live out their Downton daydreams. The English countryside has been and remains a vast, largely unlit and unknowable place, a territory of dark satanic and hedonistic potential, magical, eerie, still ruled by the ancient flux of the seasons, ultimately alive with death.

Dogging, land art, Richard Dawson and The Wicker Man; the ghosts of M25 orbital raves, exploding grain chimneys and mad cows burning in a pile; Kill List, boy racers, the view from a George Shaw painting and the stories of MR James; Derek Jarman’s cottage in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station, abattoirs, Julian Cope and thousands of pylons humming in the night like rows of metal angels, routing electricity through the darker parts of the grid to the cities where it is used to light neon bulbs, charge phones for workaday drug deals, fuel Funktion-One rigs. 

There is nothing tame or twee or sanitised about any of this stuff and, for me, it’s in this version of the English pastoral that Watership Down resides – it’s a story that understands the country as a place so full of threat, and where death is so close to hand, that life seems at its most precious. A place where death can be beautiful because life can be beautiful. Viewed through the prism of Adams’ novel and the cultural phenomena listed above, rural England is a landscape that feels wild and free – not a bucolic sedative used to placate a nation, but a psychedelic pyre on which to smoke out old ghosts and grievances, to burn up serotonin and ritual bloodlust. 

At a time when existential dread seems to be hovering so prominently in the national psyche, it’s important that we retain this image of England’s greener parts. It can remind us that darkness and death have always been part of life here, that Brexit probably isn’t gonna be as bad as the English Civil War and that, for all that it’d be fun to see him get repeatedly maced, Nigel Farage probably isn’t going to burn anyone as a witch any time soon. There is a tendency, too, to play the countryside and the cities off against each other, to make them rival opposites with the suburbs floating in a kind of purgatory in between. An Othering of the landscape occurs – if the countryside is safe, idyllic, welcoming and wholesome, as the heritage-version of it shopped by the right-wing and advertisers insists, then the city must by default be dangerous, poisoned, scowling and godless. 

It was along these battle lines that the Brexit debate – and subsequently all British politics for the next decade at least, you presume – was drawn. One of the key things that no one seems to be saying about the chaos of Brexit is that a lot of people are enjoying it. It can be enjoyable to revel in the divisions it’s wrought, to pick your side, wave your flag and start shouting: young, enlightened, compassionate, confident city-dweller vs old, racist, stupid, terrified little Englander; or – conversely – commonsensical, brave patriot vs sneering metropolitan elitist. It’s not all dread. We love a bit of tribalism in this country. But the fact you have to define the traits of each side twice over shows this dichotomy up as one that doesn’t exist, a lie fed by this portrayal of rural England as a blankly beautiful, green and blue place for simple, good-natured people to sit about staring at cows until a rich man calls up and says he wants to marry your daughter. 

It’s a lie that becomes dangerous when the tandem idea of cities as corrupted wells of villainy is extended to include the people living in them – by which I mean that Farage and the emergent, suited, smiling and smug British far-right that he leads are dangerous racists who know full well that the populations of cities include millions of non-white poor people, people they are able to attack implicitly with this weird fever dream of England as one big green happy field, tarnished by the occasional city hammered into the ground by the evil forces of progress and human curiosity. Adams’ book is often described in genre terms as a “fantasy adventure”, but it pulls no punches in introducing kids to the harsh realities and crucial importance of loss, survival, loyalty, cruelty and suffering, simultaneously kicking against this weaponised fantasy of the English countryside as a garden of serenity that must be preserved in its pure, paradisiacal form at all costs.

There are other contemporary narratives that Watership Down can be neatly slotted into if you so wish: the impetus for Fiver’s doom-y premonition and the subsequent exodus that is the story of the book are the developers that arrive to build on the land the warren is dug into, raising the spectres of gentrification and displacement. This human destruction of the natural habitat – a theme visited throughout the book – is something the BBC’s Planet Earth II series was recently criticised for ignoring; you hope it might be tackled in the forthcoming series commissioned by Netflix and the BBC. This latest adaptation of Adams’ novel is already enjoying a high profile, featuring as it does the voices of James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, John Boyega and Ben Kingsley. Again, you hope it won’t be completely sapped of its brutality, as this depressing interview with one of the producers suggests.

Obviously, ultimately, Adams would not have been able to foresee his book’s compatibility with the zeitgeist of today when it was first published in 1972. The story predates even that, beginning as a series of tales he’d spin to keep his daughters entertained on the drive to school. He was a 52-year-old civil servant at the time, a veteran of the Second World War. He had never before attempted to write fiction: “I had been put on the spot [by his two bored daughters] and I started off, ‘Once there were two rabbits called Hazel and Fiver,’” he told the Guardian in a 2015 interview. “And I just took it on from there… I don’t believe in talking down to children.” 

What emerged was a story that, to this day, retains the ability to ensnare the imagination, to tap into universal and time-defying themes that underlie all human life. Yes, it’s a story about rabbits – rabbits tearing chunks out of other rabbits, rabbits cowering in ditches and burrows under siege, rabbits getting smashed to pieces by trains, dead rabbits being led away from this realm and their meat by The Black Rabbit of Inlé, a phantom rabbit whose job it is to reap souls for the rabbit afterlife. It is a story about rabbits but also about faith, tyranny, war, society, instinct, struggle and paradise. It is a story about rabbits, but in the same way that the Bible is a story about some people who used to live in or near what we now call Israel. It is a story about death, but death in life, enriching it with meaning, pushing life on, keeping the blood moving from now till then.

When was the last time you really thought about death?

“Rabbits live close to death,” Adams wrote in his story, “and when death comes closer than usual, thinking about survival leaves little room for anything else.”

@kevkharas / holliefernandophotography.com