The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [138]
The Snow Goose
The hero of Paul Gallico's little tale The Snow Goose, written in England in 1940 during the darkest days of the Second World War, is Philip Rhayader, a painter, who lives all alone in an abandoned lighthouse on the Essex marshes.
To the inhabitants of the nearby community, this mysterious solitary figure seems to be a monster. Rhayader is a hunchback, his left arm is `crippled, thin and bent at the wrist, like the claw of a bird. But we soon learn that in reality, despite his `mis-shapen body and dark visage', Rhayader is as far from being a monster as it is possible to be, In every other sense he is a whole man, a superb sailor, strong and at the same time gentle, full of love for `man, the animal kingdom and all nature'. He lives alone on the marshes because he is at home with the birds and the sea, which form the subject of his `luminous' canvases.
In other words, as he is revealed to us, Rhayader is all light and the darkness in the story is all outside him, initially in his neighbours who regard the solitary hunchback out on the marshes with suspicion, hostility and fear.
But one day one of these neighbours comes to him, a frightened little girl carrying an injured snow goose she has found. He knows at once how to look after the bird, which he calls `The Lost Princess', and the girl Frith comes regularly to visit him, to see how the bird is getting on. Eventually the snow goose, fully recovered, flies away. Frith's visits stop and Rhayader `learned all over again the meaning of the word "loneliness"'. The child and the `Princess' have become intertwined together, profoundly important to him.
The following year, to Rhayader's amazement and joy, the `Princess' returns. He leaves a message for Frith, who resumes her visits until the bird again flies off for the summer - and this pattern continues for several years, with Rhayader enjoying alternations of happiness and loneliness, each time Frith and the great bird come back into his life for a while and then disappear again.
Then three things happen, more or less simultaneously. First, Rhayader realises that Frith is no longer just a wild little girl: she has grown up into a young woman. Second, the snow goose does not fly away as usual, but had obviously decided to stay at the lighthouse: `the Lost Princess is no more. This is her home now - of her own free will: Both Rhayader and Frith are aware of a tumult of new feelings, involving each other, which neither dares speak of. But thirdly, the darkness and conflict of the world outside suddenly intrude on them in a new and much more violent way.
It is 1940, the time of Dunkirk. Rhayader, the sailor, decides that he must answer the call for the `little boats' to help in the evacuation, and sails off with the snow goose flying over him, like a guardian angel, straight into the nightmare of the Dunkirk beaches. Amid this deafening hell of smoke, gunfire, exploding bombs and death, he performs astonishing feats of heroism, rescuing hundreds of men, until finally he is machine-gunned. His boat is spotted drifting through the smoke and chaos, his body slumped over the tiller, with the great bird still watching over him - until the boat is blown to pieces by a mine. But for all who have encountered him in that hell, he has become an almost legendary, supernatural figure. For days Frith waits looking out for him, until the `Princess' returns to circle round her, as if to tell her that Rhayader is not coming back. A few weeks later a stray German bomber blasts the lighthouse out of existence.
Obviously there is something profoundly