The Snow Goose Monologue
The Snow Goose
Frith:
I skipped along the cobblestone path, the smooth glistening rocks forming a pathway among the menagerie of white houses lined with red brick roofing. My feet carried me onto the crackly grass that was being suffocated by the thin layer of ice. The sky was overcast. I walked to the mucky mossy seawall and clambered upon it. I watched intently as the harsh dreary ocean licked at the wall, leaving behind a trail of dribble that would eventually retreat back to the mouth that it had, once, escaped from. I walked along this wall, the peculiar wind making a mess of my grimy orange tinged hair. A load bang erupted my thinking and I watched as a white creature torpedoed like a bullet from the barrel of a gun. The creature landed …show more content…
among the untamed marshland.
I ran.
I ran towards where the creature had plummeted like a comet encased in a white fiery glaze. I stopped and stared down at a goose, it was white like an iceberg. I was startled by the pronounced red splashes of blood that oozed from the goose’s ashen body. I bent down and picked up the thin boned bird and looked around for a symbol of human existence. I gazed around and stopped, I could see an obscure white building standing above the breathing marshland. I remembered the urban legend that had been passed around about an ogre who lived in the tall white pillar who could heal injured things. I walked, gingerly towards the large building and knocked on the wooden door. After a while, a bizarre man opened the door. His body was warped and behind his thick neck was a bulky hump. I looked at one of his hands and studied its form, rigid and gnarled like that of a crow’s claw. My heart raced as I stared at his murky beard. His piercing black eyes studied the bird I was carrying.
“What is it, child?” he asked in a deep, but kind voice.
I replied, “I found it, sir. It’s hurted. Is it still alive?”
“Yes. Yes, I think so. Come in, child, come in.”
He took the white bird from my arms. The bird had left a trail of blood down the lace that held by kirtle together.
I walked into the white building and watched as the bird was laid onto a table where it moved delicately. The room danced with warmth from the coal fire and shining pictures sat upon the walls. An eccentric but satisfying smell drifted through the room.
With his good hand, the man stretched one of the bird’s wings out; the end of the wing was a beautiful gleaming black.
The man looked marvelled and turned towards me and said, “Child: where did you find it?”
I replied, “In t’ marsh, sir, where fowlers had been. What – what is it, sir?”
“It’s a snow goose from Canada. But how in all heaven came it here?”
I peered at him, not registering what a snow goose actually was.
I asked, “Can’ ee heal it, sir?”
“Yes, yes,” said the man, “We will try. Come, you shall help me.”
There were scissors, bandages and splints laid upon a shelf in a precise order, and he was stunningly nimble, even with the crooked claw that managed, amazingly, to hold things.
He said, “Ah, she has been shot, poor thing. He leg is broken and the wing tip! See we will clip her primaries, so that we can bandage it, but in the spring the feathers with grow and she will be able to fly again. We will bandage it close to her body, so that she cannot move until it is set, and then we will make a splint for her leg.”
I forgot my fears and watched fascinated as he fixed a crafted splint to the birds shattered leg. He began to tell me a wonderful story.
“The bird was a young one, no more than a year old. She was born in a northern land far, far across the seas, a land belonging to England. Flying to the south to escape the snow and harsh ice and bitter cold, a great storm had captured her and whirled and battered her about. It was a truly terrible storm, stronger than her great wings, stronger than anything. For days and nights it held her captive and there was nothing she could do to fly away from the gloomy prison. When finally it had blown its self out and her sure instincts took her south again, she was over a different land and surrounded by irregular birds that she had never seen before. At last, fatigued by her torment, she had sunk to rest in a friendly jade marshland, only to be met by the blast of a hunter’s gun.
A bitter reception for a visiting princess,” concluded the man, ‘We will call her ‘La Princess Perdue,’ the Lost Princess. In a few days she will be feeling much better. See!’
I watched as he reached into his pocket and produced a handful of grainy pellets. The snow goose opened its buttery eyes and nibbled at it.
I laughed with delight and I suddenly realised where I was, I hurried away without a word.
The man cried after me, “Wait, wait!”
I was already clambering along the sea wall.
He yelled after me, “What is your name, child?”
I yelled back in reply, “Frith.”
“Eh,” he hollered, “Fritha, I suppose. Where do you live?”
“Wi’ t’ fisher folk at Wickaeldroth.”
“Will you come back tomorrow, or the next, to see how Princess is getting on?”
I paused, curious of what words would roll of my tongue. I replied, through the emotionless air, “Ay!”
I ran along the sea wall, my feet dancing across the rocks. I felt my fair hair streaming behind me.
I visited Princess and the man frequently, watching and admiring the steady process Princess was making. I had stopped fearing the man and his interesting figure. My imagination was imprisoned by the white princess from the land that was pink on the world map. One day the man and I traced the stormy path that the princess had travelled from Canada to the Great Marsh of Essex.
I remember one June morning a group of late pink-feet, fat and pudgy from the winter at the lighthouse, answered the stronger call of the breeding-grounds and rose lethargically, climbing into the sky in eddying loops. With them, her ivory body and ebony-tipped pinions shining in the daybreak sunshine, was the snow goose.
I yelled at the man, “Look! Look! The Princess! Be she going away?”
The man stared into the firmament and replied, “Ay! The Princess is going home. Listen! She is bidding us farewell.”
The sky was a flourish of white specks and out of the birds came the clear, soprano note of the snow goose.
After the snow goose, Princess, departed from the white building I didn’t return.
The man:
Frith never returned and I began to feel the essence of loneliness once again.
I had mastered my handicap, but I had not yet mastered my yearning for affection. The reason I lead such a solitary life was because women, no matter their appearance, repelled me. Men would have come to like me if they had extended a warm hand and endeavoured to get to know me. The fact of the matter is, they didn’t, and they made an effort to damage me.
That summer, out of my memory, I painted a picture of a slender, grimy girl, her fair hair blown by the November storm, who bore in her arms a wounded snowy bird.
In mid-October a miracle occurred. I was in my enclosure, feeding my array of birds. A grey northeast wind was gusting and the land was exhaling beneath the incoming tide. Above the sea and the wind noises I heard a high, clear note. I turned my eye upward, towards the evening skyline just in time to see first an infinite speck, then an ivory and ebony restrained dream that orbited around the lighthouse once, and finally a reality that dropped to earth in the pen and, came toddling forward superiorly to be fed, as though she had never been away.
It was the snow goose, voluptuous and white.
There was no mistaking her. Tears of joy cascaded down my face. Where had she been? Surely not home to Canada, I wondered. No way, she must have summered in Greenland or Spitzbergen with the pink-feet. She had remembered and she had returned.
One day I ventured to Chelmbury to obtain art supplies and I decided to leave a message with the postmistress, one that must have triggered much puzzlement. I told her, “Tell Frith, who lives with the fisher folk at Wickaeldroth that the Lost Princess has returned.”
Three days later Frith, taller, but still tousled and unkempt returned shyly to my lighthouse to visit La Princess Perdue.
Time passed.
On the Great Marsh it was marked by the rise and fall of the waves, the sluggish march of the seasons, the passage of the birds, and for me the arrival of the snow goose.
I had read in a newspaper about the world outside, the world that was boiling and seething with war and hate, the war that would hopefully not destructively caress Frith or me.
Frith and I had fallen into a curious natural rhythm, even as Frith grew older.
When the snow goose, Princess, ventured to the lighthouse Frith would return, dishevelled and wide-eyed. When she came, I taught her many things. We sailed over the rolling waves, the wind carrying us on courageous adventures. We seized wildfowl for the ever-increasing brood, and built new pens and enclosures for them. I taught her the wisdom of every wild bird, gull to gyrfalcon that glided over the marshes. She cooked for me sometimes, and I even taught her how to mix colours, to create lustrous hues unseen by the untrained eye.
Every year when the snow goose returned to its summer home, Frith would return to hers. I noticed that when the snow goose disappeared so did Frith.
One year the bird didn’t return, feeling of unhappiness washed over me, it was if everything was coming to a plummeting decline.
I painted furiously, through the winter and the next summer. Painting was my way of letting my emotions dance, run wild and dangerously. Frith didn’t come, not once, not at all.
In the fall, a familiar melody called out from the sky above. I raced outside to a blossomed white bird that was hovering above the lighthouse. It slowly descended as mysteriously as it had departed.
In pure joy, I sailed to Chelmbury. I left, once again, my message with the unquestioning …show more content…
postmistress.
Intriguingly, it took Frith a month to return. When she did, I was in shock, for she was not the grubby adolescent I had seen zipping along the seawall, she was a woman.
After the year in which the bird had remained away, its periods of absence grew shorter and shorter.
It had grown so tame that it followed me around like a lost dog. It even followed me into the studio.
The birds decided to migrate early. The world, that I had come to know, was on fire. The drone and roar of the bombers and the pounding detonations frightened them.
On the first day of May Frith and I stood shoulder to shoulder on the scungy seawall. We watched as the last of the birds floated of into the sky. Out of the corner of my eye, I peered at Frith’s beauty. She was tall and slender, infinite and compellingly beautiful. I was dark and disfigured. I stared towards the blue-grey observing the geese form their flight tracery.
“Look, Phillip!” Frith said
I followed her eye and graceful hand. I watched as the snow goose took flight, her giant wings spreading, but she was flying low. She came quite close to Frith and I, the tips of her midnight wings embracing our cheeks as she drifted past us. She circled the lighthouse, once, then twice.
I watched as she fluttered to earth again. She began to feed with the captured geese.
“She be’ent going,” said Frith, marvel floating from her mouth, “The Princess be goin’ t’ stay.”
“Ay, she will stay.
She will never go away again. The Lost Princess is lost no more. This is her home now- of her own free will.”
Frith:
“Ay, she will stay. She will never go away again. The Lost Princess is lost no more. This is her home now- of her own free will.”
I stared at the bird, her entrancing magic captivating me. I twitched, losing focus. I was frightened. I was frightened by his eyes- of the longing, the loneliness and the deep, welling, unspoken things that lay untouched behind them.
I replayed his last words in my head. “This is her home now-of her own free will.” I looked as his eyes; they carried an unexpressed message, things he could not speak of because of what he felt himself to be, grotesque. I grew more frightened as his silence pursed me. The power of unspoken things bubbled inside me. I realised that I must go, run from things I was yet to understand.
“I-I must go. Good-bye. I be glad the-the Princess will stay. You will not be so alone now.”
I turned swiftly away.
“Good-bye Frith,” the sadness in his voice trailing behind me.
I ran.
When I was far enough away, I dared to turn back and gaze at the dark speck that stood on the
seawall.
My fears vanished from my insides. It was replaced with a strange queer sense of loss that made me stand sharply still, for a moment. I continued on more slowly, away from the skyward-pointing finger of the lighthouse, away from the man that stood beneath it and away from the unknown.
Three weeks later, I returned. I watched the day as it was coming to an end, a long golden dusk that was giving passage to the silver of the moon.
I needed to know whether the snow goose had really stayed. I tread firmly along the sea wall, eagerness forcing me to hurry.
I saw a luminescent yellow light down at the little wharf. I followed its light, like a moth to moonlight. Down there I found him. His sail boat was rocking gently on the silver lined waves. He was loading supplies-food, water, brandy, gear and a spare sail.
Philip turned around to the sound of my footsteps, his face a sheet of white, his eyes glowing with a peculiar excitement. He was breathing heavily from his efforts.
Alarm bubbled inside of me. The snow goose was forgotten, “Phillip! Ye be goin away?”
He paused. He greeted me; something was quivering over his face, luminosity and a look, one I had never seen before.
“Frith! I am glad you came. Yes I must go away. A little trip. I will come back.” He said his voice hoarse.
“Where must ye go?”
He rambled on, in an erratic manner. He must go to Dunkirk. A hundred miles across the Channel, A British army was trapped there on the sand, awaiting destruction, death, at the hands of the fast approaching Germens. The port was in flames, the position hopeless. He had heard it in the village when he had gone for supplies. All the men where answering the Governors call, every boat that could propel itself was heading across the Channel to haul the men off the beach, to rescue them from the Germen’s fire.
I listened, my heart shrivelling slightly. He was saying that he would sail the Channel in his little boat. It could take six mean, maybe seven at a time. He would make many trips.
Phillip:
She listened, but was to young, inarticulate, primitive. She did not understand war, or what had happened in France, or the meaning of the trapped army, but I sensed the ruby blood that run within her told that there was danger.
“Phillip, must ye go? You will not come back. Why must it be’ ee?”
I explained it to her, so she would understand.
“Men are huddled on beaches like hunted birds. Frith, like the wounded and hunted birds we used to find and bring to the sanctuary. They have no shelter from the iron birds of prey. They need help, my dear, as our wild creatures have needed help, this 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.”
She stared at me.
Frith:
I stared at him.
He must go.
For the first time I saw that he was no longer ugly or misshapen, he was very beautiful. Things were turmoiling in my soul but I was unable to form them into sentences, unable to say them.
“I’ll come with ‘eel Phillip,” I suggested.
He shook his head, “Your place in the boat would cause a soldier to be left behind, and another, and another. I must go alone.”
He clambered into his boat.
He waved and said “Good-bye! Will you look after the birds until I return? Frith?”
I raised my hand, sadly, and offered a half-hearted wave. “God speed you,” I said, “I will take care of t’ birds. God-speed, Phillip.”
It was nightfall now, bright with moon fragment, stars and a northern radiance. I stood on the seawall and watched the sail sashay down the bloated estuary. Suddenly, from the darkness behind me, a rush of wind came. In the night light I saw a flash of white wings. The snow goose rose and headed down the meandering arms of the creek where Phillips sail was slanting in the gaining breeze.
White sail and white bird were visible for a long time.
Frith:
I skipped along the cobblestone path, the smooth glistening rocks forming a pathway among the menagerie of white houses lined with red brick roofing. My feet carried me onto the crackly grass that was being suffocated by the thin layer of ice. The sky was overcast. I walked to the mucky mossy seawall and clambered upon it. I watched intently as the harsh dreary ocean licked at the wall, leaving behind a trail of dribble that would eventually retreat back to the mouth that it had, once, escaped from. I walked along this wall, the peculiar wind making a mess of my grimy orange tinged hair. A load bang erupted my thinking and I watched as a white creature torpedoed like a bullet from the barrel of a gun. The creature landed …show more content…
among the untamed marshland.
I ran.
I ran towards where the creature had plummeted like a comet encased in a white fiery glaze. I stopped and stared down at a goose, it was white like an iceberg. I was startled by the pronounced red splashes of blood that oozed from the goose’s ashen body. I bent down and picked up the thin boned bird and looked around for a symbol of human existence. I gazed around and stopped, I could see an obscure white building standing above the breathing marshland. I remembered the urban legend that had been passed around about an ogre who lived in the tall white pillar who could heal injured things. I walked, gingerly towards the large building and knocked on the wooden door. After a while, a bizarre man opened the door. His body was warped and behind his thick neck was a bulky hump. I looked at one of his hands and studied its form, rigid and gnarled like that of a crow’s claw. My heart raced as I stared at his murky beard. His piercing black eyes studied the bird I was carrying.
“What is it, child?” he asked in a deep, but kind voice.
I replied, “I found it, sir. It’s hurted. Is it still alive?”
“Yes. Yes, I think so. Come in, child, come in.”
He took the white bird from my arms. The bird had left a trail of blood down the lace that held by kirtle together.
I walked into the white building and watched as the bird was laid onto a table where it moved delicately. The room danced with warmth from the coal fire and shining pictures sat upon the walls. An eccentric but satisfying smell drifted through the room.
With his good hand, the man stretched one of the bird’s wings out; the end of the wing was a beautiful gleaming black.
The man looked marvelled and turned towards me and said, “Child: where did you find it?”
I replied, “In t’ marsh, sir, where fowlers had been. What – what is it, sir?”
“It’s a snow goose from Canada. But how in all heaven came it here?”
I peered at him, not registering what a snow goose actually was.
I asked, “Can’ ee heal it, sir?”
“Yes, yes,” said the man, “We will try. Come, you shall help me.”
There were scissors, bandages and splints laid upon a shelf in a precise order, and he was stunningly nimble, even with the crooked claw that managed, amazingly, to hold things.
He said, “Ah, she has been shot, poor thing. He leg is broken and the wing tip! See we will clip her primaries, so that we can bandage it, but in the spring the feathers with grow and she will be able to fly again. We will bandage it close to her body, so that she cannot move until it is set, and then we will make a splint for her leg.”
I forgot my fears and watched fascinated as he fixed a crafted splint to the birds shattered leg. He began to tell me a wonderful story.
“The bird was a young one, no more than a year old. She was born in a northern land far, far across the seas, a land belonging to England. Flying to the south to escape the snow and harsh ice and bitter cold, a great storm had captured her and whirled and battered her about. It was a truly terrible storm, stronger than her great wings, stronger than anything. For days and nights it held her captive and there was nothing she could do to fly away from the gloomy prison. When finally it had blown its self out and her sure instincts took her south again, she was over a different land and surrounded by irregular birds that she had never seen before. At last, fatigued by her torment, she had sunk to rest in a friendly jade marshland, only to be met by the blast of a hunter’s gun.
A bitter reception for a visiting princess,” concluded the man, ‘We will call her ‘La Princess Perdue,’ the Lost Princess. In a few days she will be feeling much better. See!’
I watched as he reached into his pocket and produced a handful of grainy pellets. The snow goose opened its buttery eyes and nibbled at it.
I laughed with delight and I suddenly realised where I was, I hurried away without a word.
The man cried after me, “Wait, wait!”
I was already clambering along the sea wall.
He yelled after me, “What is your name, child?”
I yelled back in reply, “Frith.”
“Eh,” he hollered, “Fritha, I suppose. Where do you live?”
“Wi’ t’ fisher folk at Wickaeldroth.”
“Will you come back tomorrow, or the next, to see how Princess is getting on?”
I paused, curious of what words would roll of my tongue. I replied, through the emotionless air, “Ay!”
I ran along the sea wall, my feet dancing across the rocks. I felt my fair hair streaming behind me.
I visited Princess and the man frequently, watching and admiring the steady process Princess was making. I had stopped fearing the man and his interesting figure. My imagination was imprisoned by the white princess from the land that was pink on the world map. One day the man and I traced the stormy path that the princess had travelled from Canada to the Great Marsh of Essex.
I remember one June morning a group of late pink-feet, fat and pudgy from the winter at the lighthouse, answered the stronger call of the breeding-grounds and rose lethargically, climbing into the sky in eddying loops. With them, her ivory body and ebony-tipped pinions shining in the daybreak sunshine, was the snow goose.
I yelled at the man, “Look! Look! The Princess! Be she going away?”
The man stared into the firmament and replied, “Ay! The Princess is going home. Listen! She is bidding us farewell.”
The sky was a flourish of white specks and out of the birds came the clear, soprano note of the snow goose.
After the snow goose, Princess, departed from the white building I didn’t return.
The man:
Frith never returned and I began to feel the essence of loneliness once again.
I had mastered my handicap, but I had not yet mastered my yearning for affection. The reason I lead such a solitary life was because women, no matter their appearance, repelled me. Men would have come to like me if they had extended a warm hand and endeavoured to get to know me. The fact of the matter is, they didn’t, and they made an effort to damage me.
That summer, out of my memory, I painted a picture of a slender, grimy girl, her fair hair blown by the November storm, who bore in her arms a wounded snowy bird.
In mid-October a miracle occurred. I was in my enclosure, feeding my array of birds. A grey northeast wind was gusting and the land was exhaling beneath the incoming tide. Above the sea and the wind noises I heard a high, clear note. I turned my eye upward, towards the evening skyline just in time to see first an infinite speck, then an ivory and ebony restrained dream that orbited around the lighthouse once, and finally a reality that dropped to earth in the pen and, came toddling forward superiorly to be fed, as though she had never been away.
It was the snow goose, voluptuous and white.
There was no mistaking her. Tears of joy cascaded down my face. Where had she been? Surely not home to Canada, I wondered. No way, she must have summered in Greenland or Spitzbergen with the pink-feet. She had remembered and she had returned.
One day I ventured to Chelmbury to obtain art supplies and I decided to leave a message with the postmistress, one that must have triggered much puzzlement. I told her, “Tell Frith, who lives with the fisher folk at Wickaeldroth that the Lost Princess has returned.”
Three days later Frith, taller, but still tousled and unkempt returned shyly to my lighthouse to visit La Princess Perdue.
Time passed.
On the Great Marsh it was marked by the rise and fall of the waves, the sluggish march of the seasons, the passage of the birds, and for me the arrival of the snow goose.
I had read in a newspaper about the world outside, the world that was boiling and seething with war and hate, the war that would hopefully not destructively caress Frith or me.
Frith and I had fallen into a curious natural rhythm, even as Frith grew older.
When the snow goose, Princess, ventured to the lighthouse Frith would return, dishevelled and wide-eyed. When she came, I taught her many things. We sailed over the rolling waves, the wind carrying us on courageous adventures. We seized wildfowl for the ever-increasing brood, and built new pens and enclosures for them. I taught her the wisdom of every wild bird, gull to gyrfalcon that glided over the marshes. She cooked for me sometimes, and I even taught her how to mix colours, to create lustrous hues unseen by the untrained eye.
Every year when the snow goose returned to its summer home, Frith would return to hers. I noticed that when the snow goose disappeared so did Frith.
One year the bird didn’t return, feeling of unhappiness washed over me, it was if everything was coming to a plummeting decline.
I painted furiously, through the winter and the next summer. Painting was my way of letting my emotions dance, run wild and dangerously. Frith didn’t come, not once, not at all.
In the fall, a familiar melody called out from the sky above. I raced outside to a blossomed white bird that was hovering above the lighthouse. It slowly descended as mysteriously as it had departed.
In pure joy, I sailed to Chelmbury. I left, once again, my message with the unquestioning …show more content…
postmistress.
Intriguingly, it took Frith a month to return. When she did, I was in shock, for she was not the grubby adolescent I had seen zipping along the seawall, she was a woman.
After the year in which the bird had remained away, its periods of absence grew shorter and shorter.
It had grown so tame that it followed me around like a lost dog. It even followed me into the studio.
The birds decided to migrate early. The world, that I had come to know, was on fire. The drone and roar of the bombers and the pounding detonations frightened them.
On the first day of May Frith and I stood shoulder to shoulder on the scungy seawall. We watched as the last of the birds floated of into the sky. Out of the corner of my eye, I peered at Frith’s beauty. She was tall and slender, infinite and compellingly beautiful. I was dark and disfigured. I stared towards the blue-grey observing the geese form their flight tracery.
“Look, Phillip!” Frith said
I followed her eye and graceful hand. I watched as the snow goose took flight, her giant wings spreading, but she was flying low. She came quite close to Frith and I, the tips of her midnight wings embracing our cheeks as she drifted past us. She circled the lighthouse, once, then twice.
I watched as she fluttered to earth again. She began to feed with the captured geese.
“She be’ent going,” said Frith, marvel floating from her mouth, “The Princess be goin’ t’ stay.”
“Ay, she will stay.
She will never go away again. The Lost Princess is lost no more. This is her home now- of her own free will.”
Frith:
“Ay, she will stay. She will never go away again. The Lost Princess is lost no more. This is her home now- of her own free will.”
I stared at the bird, her entrancing magic captivating me. I twitched, losing focus. I was frightened. I was frightened by his eyes- of the longing, the loneliness and the deep, welling, unspoken things that lay untouched behind them.
I replayed his last words in my head. “This is her home now-of her own free will.” I looked as his eyes; they carried an unexpressed message, things he could not speak of because of what he felt himself to be, grotesque. I grew more frightened as his silence pursed me. The power of unspoken things bubbled inside me. I realised that I must go, run from things I was yet to understand.
“I-I must go. Good-bye. I be glad the-the Princess will stay. You will not be so alone now.”
I turned swiftly away.
“Good-bye Frith,” the sadness in his voice trailing behind me.
I ran.
When I was far enough away, I dared to turn back and gaze at the dark speck that stood on the
seawall.
My fears vanished from my insides. It was replaced with a strange queer sense of loss that made me stand sharply still, for a moment. I continued on more slowly, away from the skyward-pointing finger of the lighthouse, away from the man that stood beneath it and away from the unknown.
Three weeks later, I returned. I watched the day as it was coming to an end, a long golden dusk that was giving passage to the silver of the moon.
I needed to know whether the snow goose had really stayed. I tread firmly along the sea wall, eagerness forcing me to hurry.
I saw a luminescent yellow light down at the little wharf. I followed its light, like a moth to moonlight. Down there I found him. His sail boat was rocking gently on the silver lined waves. He was loading supplies-food, water, brandy, gear and a spare sail.
Philip turned around to the sound of my footsteps, his face a sheet of white, his eyes glowing with a peculiar excitement. He was breathing heavily from his efforts.
Alarm bubbled inside of me. The snow goose was forgotten, “Phillip! Ye be goin away?”
He paused. He greeted me; something was quivering over his face, luminosity and a look, one I had never seen before.
“Frith! I am glad you came. Yes I must go away. A little trip. I will come back.” He said his voice hoarse.
“Where must ye go?”
He rambled on, in an erratic manner. He must go to Dunkirk. A hundred miles across the Channel, A British army was trapped there on the sand, awaiting destruction, death, at the hands of the fast approaching Germens. The port was in flames, the position hopeless. He had heard it in the village when he had gone for supplies. All the men where answering the Governors call, every boat that could propel itself was heading across the Channel to haul the men off the beach, to rescue them from the Germen’s fire.
I listened, my heart shrivelling slightly. He was saying that he would sail the Channel in his little boat. It could take six mean, maybe seven at a time. He would make many trips.
Phillip:
She listened, but was to young, inarticulate, primitive. She did not understand war, or what had happened in France, or the meaning of the trapped army, but I sensed the ruby blood that run within her told that there was danger.
“Phillip, must ye go? You will not come back. Why must it be’ ee?”
I explained it to her, so she would understand.
“Men are huddled on beaches like hunted birds. Frith, like the wounded and hunted birds we used to find and bring to the sanctuary. They have no shelter from the iron birds of prey. They need help, my dear, as our wild creatures have needed help, this 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.”
She stared at me.
Frith:
I stared at him.
He must go.
For the first time I saw that he was no longer ugly or misshapen, he was very beautiful. Things were turmoiling in my soul but I was unable to form them into sentences, unable to say them.
“I’ll come with ‘eel Phillip,” I suggested.
He shook his head, “Your place in the boat would cause a soldier to be left behind, and another, and another. I must go alone.”
He clambered into his boat.
He waved and said “Good-bye! Will you look after the birds until I return? Frith?”
I raised my hand, sadly, and offered a half-hearted wave. “God speed you,” I said, “I will take care of t’ birds. God-speed, Phillip.”
It was nightfall now, bright with moon fragment, stars and a northern radiance. I stood on the seawall and watched the sail sashay down the bloated estuary. Suddenly, from the darkness behind me, a rush of wind came. In the night light I saw a flash of white wings. The snow goose rose and headed down the meandering arms of the creek where Phillips sail was slanting in the gaining breeze.
White sail and white bird were visible for a long time.