How owls helped me conquer my fear of the dark

As a child I was afraid of the dark, as so many children are. Not the dark in and of itself, but what I was certain it contained: bad spirits, bad people, monsters with ill intent. The dark hid creatures with talons and teeth, or men with weapons who would use them to sneak up on an unsuspecting child and do them harm. The dark let curses slip out of buildings or hedges and attach to a child walking past. I kept myself bounded within the dome of torchlight on winter afternoons, thinking of light as a spell of protection. I went to bed by the orange glow of a nightlight, the hall light on and the door ajar.

I borrowed Jill Tomlinson’s book The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark from the library and fell in love with the baby barn owl, Plop. He thinks “dark is nasty” and won’t go hunting with his parents. He learns through others who love the dark that it can be exciting, kind, fun, necessary, wonderful, beautiful and super. I identified with Plop, but I wasn’t convinced about the wonderfulness of the dark.

At the same time, I read and reread Phyllis Arkle’s Magic at Midnight, in which all the animals depicted on all the signs of a village’s many pubs climb down from their frames as the clock strikes 12. One of the signs features an owl, and my Puffin copy of the book had a beautiful watercolour tawny owl on the cover. These stories reframed night-time as a magical space where anything could happen. I began to see the possibilities of the dark, but I still preferred to meet it with a safety cordon of light.

When I first left home, I swapped the faint glow of suburban Nottingham for east London, where atmospheric light pollution meant that night was never even close to dark. I used to love how the streetlight threw its orange into my room, like a city-wide nightlight. I find this remarkable now, when I need total darkness to sleep, and a single LED in a room can keep me alert until dawn.

All this changed for me when I moved to the Lake District, at 26. There I cohabited with real dark for the first time in my life. I spent more time outdoors and more time at night. I learned the wonder of a starful sky, how the longer you look up the more appear and the deeper you can see into the fabric of the universe. On frosty evenings when the stars were sparkling like ice and seemed close enough to touch, I would wrap myself up in my granny’s sheepskin coat and lie on a quiet back road and stretch out into the sky, to the soundtrack of owls calling from the woods. I learned to love the dark and everything that lives in it and needs it.

Learning to love the dark changed my relationship with night-time. I always struggled to fall asleep, even as a small child. I would read or listen to music to lull myself into the kind of space where sleep might enter, but it was never guaranteed. In my teens, I became very ill, with the combination of two undiagnosed genetic conditions – Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) and haemochromatosis – although I would not know this until much later. Both conditions cause a host of debilitating symptoms, including fatigue and widespread pain. I found myself needing more and more sleep to feel even slightly rested, but was less and less able to slip into it. Many nights, I’d doze off less than an hour before the alarm went off.

Night became a space of a new kind of fear: fear of never being able to sleep, of being too exhausted to move or think the next day. I tried every strategy I could to shut myself down. I found it helped if I accepted wakefulness and gave up trying to sleep. I would circle the garden when everyone else was sleeping, talking to the foxes and the owls who lived in the trees around its fringes. I would moonbathe. I would write.

Eventually, this extreme insomnia retreated, peaking over the years when physical or emotional distress roused it. In my mid-30s I found myself again awake in the night, talking to the owls, this time because of an unhealing, unrecognised broken rib that would eventually lead to the diagnoses of my other conditions. I learnt the term “painsomnia”. It reared up again in the autumn of 2019, when a sudden worsening of gastroparesis – a paralysis of the stomach common in EDS – meant I could not lie down without terrible nausea and pain. It was more comfortable to stay upright and keep moving and so, if I could, I would put my boots on over my pyjamas and pace up the owl-lined road behind our house.

I had learned, by then, to see the owls as companions. Tawny owls had been a feature of my life in the Lake District since the beginning, coming down from the woods at night to call around the cottages. But during the first lockdown of 2020, they took on a deeper significance. My partner and I took the same walk regularly after work, and most days met a tawny owl, sunbathing on a low branch. I determined to find out more about tawny owls, to be a better neighbour. In the spring of 2021, we were rewarded by seeing owlets for the first time. In the midst of fear and despair they brought us great joy. They reminded us to think beyond ourselves, of the other lives crossing our own.

As the pandemic progressed and the majority of able-bodied people chose to believe our government that Covid was no threat to their health, and so gave up trying to avoid infection, I found myself increasingly isolated. Not by the virus itself, but by the lack of solidarity and consideration. Like so many chronically ill people, I knew what the virus could mean for me, and for others, but I could not make people care enough to take action. I found myself choosing the company of owls over the company of most humans.

In 2023, my partner and I were enormously lucky to walk past a nest box at the precise moment that the year’s three owlets chose to step out of it. We were able to follow their progress over the coming months. Watching these owlets and the way they would play together made me reflect on human companionship and human failures, on how we look after each other, or don’t.

Sitting in the woods at twilight as the owlets leapt around in the treetops, I thought of how I used to take it as a slight when people said I reminded them of an owl, with my sharp nose and big eyes. I did not want to be owlish, but I do have more in common with an owl than I’d thought. We are both at our best in the night-time; enjoy a good bath; are hypersensitive to sound and light. Our ears are asymmetrical on our heads and our stomachs will get blocked by indigestible food. We can both turn our heads round and look over our shoulders, except my vascular system is not designed to bend like that.

When we first saw the owlets, we realised we had heard them in many previous years, but not realised what we were hearing, their strange skeeeee skeeeeee squeaking so unlike the familiar tu-whit tu-who hoots of adult owls. This, too, reminded me of myself.

When I first learned to speak, I spoke a language of my own making. My words were consistent, my sentences structured, but entirely distinct. I started school at four still speaking my own language, and it took many months of speech therapy to cajole me into surrendering to English. I suspect this is much of why I became a writer. My first experience of language was of crying out like an owlet in a wood, and not being recognised as one of my species. Now I choose to put my words down on the page. Still, every time I open my mouth to speak, a part of me is thinking, will this be understood? Be more owlet, I tell myself. Just call out, and trust you’ll be heard.

Each year, come the autumn, the owlets are trying on their adult voices, wobbly whooo hoooos echoing from the woods as they call out the boundaries of their first homes alone. We don’t know what each winter will hold for them, or for us. But they know what they’re doing. We have to trust them and their knowledge, as much as we have to care for our shared habitats. They have survived for millennia, adapting to changing circumstances. If they can do it, maybe we can too. Hopefully, we can do it together, one spring at a time.

The Company of Owls by Polly Atkin is published by Elliott & Thompson at £16.99. Buy it for £14.44 from guardianbookshop.com