The Snow Goose

This outstanding novella, published in 1941, is set on the Essex coast. The central character, Philip Rhayader, is a maimed and crippled veteran of war and lives quietly on his own by the wilderness of the Great Marsh. He is a talented artist and a caring foster parent of migratory birds. One winter day a girl called Frith brings an injured snow goose to his door aware “that this ogre who lived in the lighthouse had magic that could heal injured things”.

The goose is brought back to health and leaves in the spring. When she returns each year, he sends a message to Frith to announce her return and she resumes her friendship with Philip. In 1940 when he hears in the village about the need for small boats to evacuate soldiers from the beaches in Dunkirk, he decides to go there in his small sailing boat. The goose flies with him and is a harbinger of rescue.

The author, Paul Gallico (born 26 July 1897), grew up in New York City. Both of his parents were from Central Europe. He served as a gunner's mate in the United States Navy in 1918. From 1922 to 1936 he worked as a journalist on the New York Daily News before moving to England. He bought a house in south Devon and, like the central character of this novella, lived by the sea. His first works of fiction were published in literary magazines in the late 1930s. This novella first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and won the O. Henry Prize for short fiction in 1941.

The central character came to live by the Great Marsh in early 1930 at the age of 27. If then he was born in 1902, he was only 15 or 16 when he went to war in which he had “fought valiantly” (or else he served in one of the conflicts that followed the war). He was generally left alone by the local people “for he was a hunchback and his left arm was crippled”. Having helped the birds of the marshland for many years, he uses this concern as a simile and metaphor for his response to the Dunkirk crisis. He explains to the young girl who has befriended him:
“Men are huddled on the beaches like hunted birds, Frith, like the wounded and hunted birds we used to find and bring to sanctuary. Over them fly the steel peregrines, hawks and gyrfalcons and they have no shelter from these iron birds of prey. They are lost and storm-driven and harried, like the [snow goose] you found and brought to me out of the marshes many years ago... They need help, my dear, as our wild creatures have needed help and that is why I must go. It is something I can do. Yes, I can. For once — for once I can be a man and play my part.”