In Companion to Owls, a thoughtful and authentic evocation of a Huguenot family living in the Fens in the 17th century, Tessa West portrays the warmth and the harshness of life in a small community whose existence is defined by the task of draining flooded lands and the desire to live good lives.

Almost before you notice it you will find yourself caring about the Deschamps family. The arrival of Scottish prisoners of war interrupts their steady life and Jenne, the daughter, falls in love with Iain Alleyn. Life, once straightforward, becomes complicated by epilepsy, a death, sabotage, jealousy, estrangement and a young girl’s risky relationship.

The Fens are an essential feature of Companion to Owls and readers of Tessa West’s other novels will find them portrayed as honestly and vividly as the land and riverscapes in The Estuary and The Reed Flute.

This novel has a quiet shine to it. It is beautifully researched, unblinking, always kind. Sharing the lives of a Huguenot family living in the Fens, and see-sawing between their snatches of happiness and their tears, one comes to feel that, yes, this is how things really were.
Kevin Crossley-Holland

£7.99 - buy here

ISBN 978-0-9543627-2-0
Cover design by Mike Hamilton

Extracts from Companion to Owls

6th January 1652, Thorney

On Sunday morning Jenne opened the chest and took out her favourite shift and a clean white bonnet. By quarter to ten they were setting off along the causeway.

During the night it had snowed again and it was impossible to tell where the sides of the track were. But though someone would stumble into a drift from time to time there were no complaints. In fact, as more families joined the little procession, Jenne decided that the snowy weather wakened everyone up and brought out the best in them. Maman was holding on to Papa’s arm and almost giggling. Papa was laughing too and turning a blind eye to Jacob who was chasing a boy with a snowball. The sky was bright white. The usually unremarkable walk was transformed into a special occasion.

Now they turned left. The track here was easier to walk along because the English had already made a path when they attended Mass that morning.

"Look up at the towers," said Pere, "Grace a Dieu. Aren't they magnificent today?"

The towers and the stone front were covered with ice crystals and gleamed as if they were already lit by the evening sun. Jenne felt a momentary wash of dizziness from the brightness and had to close her eyes. As she entered the Abbey Church she read, as she always read, the date by the porch. She often thought about this date because her father had once told her that her life had begun in Sandtoft at the same time as the Abbey Church was being restored. He said men would have been shoving and levering slabs of stone while she was learning to walk and talk and that someone – she often wondered who – had carefully carved those four numbers: 1, 6, 3 and 8, not knowing that she, Jenne, was two years old and would one day live in Thorney and see his work.

Inside the Abbey Church families were moving to their usual places. Only last week Jacob had wondered if the family stood on exactly the same flagstones each Sunday. Perhaps he was right. She looked down at the floor and saw it was already covered in water from the snow melting off people’s shoes even though they had left their pattens in the porch. She had noticed Susannah Wantie and Isabel Guoy going to the wall for the last month or two because they were pregnant. They sat with the old people.

Jenne was looking out for the Roo family who would be late if they did not arrive soon. She thought of their farm in French Drove and realised they would face a difficult walk to reach the Abbey Church that morning. It would probably take them the best part of an hour, so perhaps they would not see Piere until the afternoon.

The murmuring lessened and people settled as the priest began to chant the first of the verses everyone knew so well: "O Souverain pasteur et maistre..."

Quiet voices joined in and gradually that warm feeling of being together and enclosed and safe in this huge church spread amongst them. It was like being in another sort of home: they were listening to French, praying in French, thinking in French. On Sundays they spoke only French all day. On Sundays they all felt part of this congregation, this bigger family, and it was good. Now the prayers changed to those for the people who had died or been tortured in the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France. Then there was a pause before the priest began his sermon. This was the long part of the service but by now Jenne had learned how to adjust her weight from one side to the other, how to shuffle her feet quietly. She looked around and started to silently name those near to her: Marie and Paul Tafin, Phillipe and Danielle Frouchart and their sleeping baby, Samuel Massingarbe whose wife died recently, the Du Quenes, the De La Noys.

She heard the church door opening and turned to see if it was the Roos. It was. There was Piere’s father, leading his family in. Piere was the last to enter. She caught Mathieu’s eye and he nodded a nod which confirmed he was going to ask him to go to Whittlesey. They had already talked about how they would go across Knarr Fen and down to Thorney Dyke heading south all the way until they reached the Nene.

The Nene. She had never been so far from home, except when she was little and her parents had brought her and her brothers down from Sandtoft in Yorkshire, way beyond Holland, even beyond Lincoln. But Mathieu – lucky Mathieu – had already been off in different directions. Their Uncle Jacques had taken him to Wisbech and to Chatteris, and had recently promised to take him to Ely where there was a cathedral on a hill. She could imagine its towers reaching into the clouds.

But this very week she herself would be skating on Whittlesey Meer. What could be better than that?

The hem of Jenne’s shift and her boots were wet and cold, and a shiver went through her. She looked at the floor again. Strangely, instead of the water settling into the uneven dips in the stones, it was rising up in wavelets, as if wind were pushing across a pond. It shouldn’t be like that but she couldn’t make it lie flat. Suddenly she couldn’t breathe, and she reached out to grab Papa but her back arched away from him and her hand would not do what she wanted. And now the roof and pillars were falling in and Jacob was looking down at her, his hair flopping forward round his face. She smelt blackberries as the back of her head hit the flagstones.

21st September 1662, by a river

Daniel was crouching on the far side of a river several miles away from where he lived, with two lit lanterns at his feet. His father had told him exactly what he had to do: wait in the sedge until he could no longer hear the sound of the punt being poled back across the water, then take up the two lanterns and, holding one in each hand, walk upstream along the dykebank as far as the stone bridge. If he heard anyone nearby he was to put the lanterns out and hide. If no one came he was to leave them alight until he reached the bridge where he was to hide until he was collected.

"If you do that," said his father, "The dykemen will think we Tigers are on that side of the river and they'll cross over when really we'll be on this side. It'll give us time to reach the sluice."

"But what if they find me?" asked Daniel.

"They won't find you because you're small. You can go deeper into the rushes than they can. They'd sink in, wouldn't they? But don't try to swim or you'll drown."

So he had been ferried across the river in the darkness watching the wet quant gleam each time it was lifted from the water. As he heard the calls of small birds he worried alternately about not returning to his mother and the task he was about to carry out for his father, but when the boat reached the bank and hissed into the reeds he scrambled out at once and was passed the lanterns.

Then his father got out, struck a spark, lit the lanterns, got back into the punt and pushed off. Daniel listened to the sound of the boat receding until he could no longer hear it.

He picked up the lanterns and began to walk. Within a minute or two he found he could not hold them out with straight arms. He had been told to do that so the dykemen would think he was more than one person, but the lanterns were far too heavy, and if he held them by his sides they lit up the track and helped him see where he was going. He kept looking across the river in the hope of seeing a light to prove he was not the only person on this dark, unknown riverbank. He forced himself onwards trying not to think about will o' the wisps.

He heard a noise of slithering and stopped dead. What could that have been? Something quite big. Bigger than any duck or rat. He suddenly felt his stomach contract. He put the lanterns on the ground and hurried to loosen his clothes. He crouched there in the dark and relieved himself, looking at the two overlapping domes of lamp-light each surrounded by darkness. He shut his eyes to concentrate on listening, but there were only the noises of night birds. It occurred to him that perhaps what he had heard was an otter. He picked up the lanterns and continued.

There was nothing to measure his journey by. Most dykeside paths were the same, especially at night, for they were all straight and bare of any growing thing except reeds and bulrushes. He could only recognise the ones close to his home because of the elder bush which leaned sideways, the tying-up post, the shallow place where the cattle waded. On this bank it was as if he was in the middle of nowhere and walking to nowhere. He slowed down a little, wondering if his mother would be able to get her poppy tea or if because he was not there to get it for her she was coughing and retching.

Suddenly he heard voices and turned to check where they were coming from. He looked back down the river, and saw lights moving across it. They seemed to be floating by themselves but they must be on a boat. That meant men were coming after him. How far away was the bridge he was supposed to reach? Could he risk going further on while he counted up to fifty? When he reached fifty he would hide. In his haste he lost his shoe in the mud but wasn’t going back.

It was quiet again so he hurried on and started counting from one again, but still there was no bridge, so he looked for a marshy den to hide in. Finding one he sloshed in too fast, dropped the lanterns into the river, stumbled and found himself in water up to his chest.

He strained to listen above the hammer of his heart, and wanted to cough but had learned early in life how to stifle his coughing. So, gasping with cold and with his eyes less than a foot above water-level, he waited in the slight light that leaned on the surface.

The next sound he heard was not the voice of a man but the bark of a dog. Dogs? Why hadn’t Da said anything about dogs? Dogs could go anywhere, could smell anything - he had often seen them bounding along to retrieve fowl. He would be forced to swim for it if a dog came near him, and if he swam he’d drown.

As he waited he heard more voices, more barking and then saw the flicker of lights coming nearer.

A man called out, "Find him, Nab! Find him," and Daniel heard a dog crashing through the reeds and panting. He imagined its pink tongue rolling, its wet nose sniffing first his shit and then his shoe.

"Is he in there? Good dog, good boy."

There was nothing to do but swim for it so Daniel struck out from the bank away from his hiding-place in the reeds.

"There he is!" yelled another voice. "Get him, Nab. Get him!"

A sharp pain tore through his heel and within minutes he was yanked back to the bank where men he did not know surrounded him.

"What are you doing out at night?"

"So the Tigers are getting children to do their work now."

"Who is he?"

"What’s his name?"

"What’s your name?"

"He’s too frightened to speak"

"Look at his ankle."

"Nab did a good job, then."