‘We sailed when the last man was off, an’ there was more than seven hunder’ of us haboard a boat built to take two hunder’. ’E was still there when we left, an’ ’e waved us good-bye and sails off towards Dunkirk, and the bird wiv ’im. Blimy, it was queer to see that ruddy big goose flyin’ around ’is boat, lit up by the fires like a white hangel against the smoke.
‘A Stuka ’ad another go at us, ’arfway across, but ’e’d been stayin’ up late nights, an’ missed. By mornin’ we was safe ’ome.
‘Hi never did find out what become of ’im, or ’oo ’e was – ’im wiv the ’ump an’ ’is little sail-boat. A bloody good man ’e was, that chap.’
‘Coo,’ said the artilleryman. ‘A ruddy big goose. Whatcher know?’
In an officer’s club in Brook Street, a retired naval officer, sixty-five years old, Commander Keith Brill-Oudener, was telling of his experiences during the evacuation of Dunkirk. Called out of bed at four o’clock in the morning, he had captained a lopsided Limehouse tug across the Channel, towing a string of Thames barges, which he brought back four times loaded with soldiers. On his last trip he came in with her funnel shot away and a hole in her side. But he got her back to Dover.
A naval-reserve officer, who had two Brixham trawlers and a Yarmouth drifter blasted out from under him in the last four days of the evacuation, said: ‘Did you run across that queer sort of legend about a wild goose? It was all up and down the beaches. You know how those things spring up. Some of the men I brought back were talking about it. It was supposed to have appeared at intervals the last days between Dunkirk and La Panne. If you saw it, you were eventually saved. That sort of thing.’
‘H’m’m’m,’ said Brill-Oudener, ‘a wild goose. I saw a tame one. Dashed strange experience. Tragic in a way, too. And lucky for us. Tell you about it. Third trip back. Toward six o’clock we sighted a derelict small boat. Seemed to be a chap or a body in her. And a bird perched on the rail.
‘We changed our course when we got nearer, and went over for a look-see. By Gad, it was a chap. Or had been, poor fellow. Machine-gunned, you know. Badly. Face down in the water. Bird was a goose, a tame one.
‘We drifted close, but when one of our chaps reached over, the bird hissed at him and struck at him with her wings. Couldn’t drive it off. Suddenly young Kettering, who was with me, gave a hail and pointed to starboard. Big mine floating by. One of Jerry’s beauties. If we’d kept on our course we’d have piled right into it. Ugh! Head on. We let it get a hundred yards astern of the last barge, and the men blew it up with rifle-fire.
‘When we turned our attention to the derelict again, she was gone. Sunk. Concussion, you know. Chap with her. He must have been lashed to her. The bird had got up and was circling. Three times, like a plane saluting. Dashed queer feeling. Then she flew off to the west. Lucky thing for us we went over to have a look, eh? Odd that you should mention a goose’
Fritha remained alone at the little lighthouse on the Great Marsh, taking care of the pinioned birds, waiting for she knew not what. The first days she haunted the sea wall, watching; though she knew it was useless. Later she roamed through the storerooms of the lighthouse building with their stacks of canvases on which Rhayader had captured every mood and light of the desolate country and the wondrous, graceful, feathered things that inhabited it.
Among them she found the picture that Rhayader had painted of her from memory so many years ago, when she was still a child, and had stood, windblown and timid, at his threshold, hugging an injured bird to her.
The picture and the things she saw in it stirred her as nothing ever had before, for much of Rhayader’s soul had gone into it. Strangely, it was the only time he had painted the snow goose, the lost wild creature, storm-driven from another land, that to each had brought a friend, and which, in the end, returned to her with the message that she would never see him again.
Long before the snow goose had come dropping out of a crimsoned eastern sky to circle the lighthouse in a last farewell, Fritha, from the ancient powers of the blood that was in her, knew that Rhayader would not return.
And so, when one sunset she heard the high-pitched, well-remembered note cried from the heavens, it brought no instant of false hope to her heart. This moment, it seemed, she had lived before many times.
She came running to the sea wall and turned her eyes, not toward the distant Channel whence a sail might come, but in the sky from whose flaming arches plummeted the snow goose. Then the sight, the sound, and the solitude surrounding broke the dam within her and released the surging, overwhelming truth of her love, let it well forth in tears.
Wild spirit called to wild spirit, and she seemed to be flying with the great bird, soaring with it in the evening sky and hearkening to Rhayader’s message.
Sky and earth were trembling with it and filled her beyond the bearing of it. ‘Frith! Fritha! Frith, my love. Good-bye, my love.’ The white pinions, black-tipped, were beating it out upon her heart, and her heart was answering: ‘Philip, I love ’ee,’
For a moment Frith thought the snow goose was going to land in the old enclousre, as the pinioned geese set up a welcoming gabble. But it only skimmed low then soared up again, flew in a wide, graceful spiral once around the old light, and then began to climb.
Watching it, Frith saw no longer the snow goose but the soul of Rhayader taking farewell of her before departing for ever.
She was no longer flying with it! but earth-bound. She stretched her arms up into the sky and stood on tip-toes, reaching, and cried: ‘God-speed, God-speed, Philp!’
Frith’s tears were stilled. She stood watching silently long after the goose had vanised. Then she went into the lighthouse and secured the picture that Rhayader had painted of her. Hugging it to her breast, she wended her way homeward along the old sea wall.
Each night, for many weeks thereafter, Frith came to the lighthouse and fed the pinioned birds. Then one early morning a German pilot on a dawn raid mistook the old abandoned light for an active military objective, dived on to it, a screaming steel hawk, and blew it and all it contained into oblivion.
That evening when Fritha came, the sea had moved in through the breached walls and covered it over. Nothing was left to break the utter desolation. No marsh fowl had dared to return. Only the frightless gulls wheeled and mewed their plaint over the place where it had been.
About Author
Paul Gallico was born in New York City in 1897, of Italian and Austrian parentage, and later attended Columbia University. From 1922 to 1936 he worked on the New York Daily News as sports editor, columnist and assistant managing editor. In 1936 he bought a house on top of a hill at Salcombe in South Devon and settled down with a Great Dane and twenty-three assorted cats. It was in 1941 that he made his name with The Snow Goose, a classic story of Dunkirk that became a world-wide bestseller. Having served as a gunner’s mate in the US Navy in 1918, he was again active as a war correspondent with the American Expeditionary Force in 1944. Paul Gallico, who later lived in Monaco, was a first-class fencer and a keen sea-fisherman. He wrote over forty books, among them: The Adventures of Hiram Holliday (1939), The Lonely (1947), Jennie (1950), Trial by Terror (1952), The Small Miracle (1952), The Foolish Immortals (1953), Thomasina (1957), The Hurricane Story (1959), Too Many Ghosts (1961), The Story of Silent Night (1967), The Poseidon Adventure (1969), Matilda (1970), Zoo Gang (1971) and Matilda in the Wilderness (1975). A posthumous work, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, was published in 1978. Penguin also publishes a volume of collected novels, The World of Mrs Harris. Paul Gallico died in 1976.