Letter reveals author broke lover’s heart
IN HIS memoirs, Richard Adams wrote movingly of his wartime love.
The Watership Down author told of his sadness at splitting up with 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 military medic named Isolde.
“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 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 are the 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.”