The Snow Goose Narration

Music inspired by and narration adapted from the story "The Snow Goose" by Paul Gallico

Songs written and originally released by Camel

Some Mp3's recorded live during rehearsal in the JJ KAS living room

 

The Great Marsh (Mp3 song sample with narration)

On the Essex coast lies a great marsh.  It was one of the last wild places in England.  It was desolate.  Lonely.

 

In the spring of 1930, Philip Rhayader came to the abandoned lighthouse.  He lived and worked there alone the year round.  A painter of birds and of nature, he had withdrawn from all human society, for he was a hunchback, and his left arm was crippled, thin and bent at the wrist, like the claw of a bird. He was a friend to all things wild, and the wild things repaid him with their friendship.

 

The thing that drove him into seclusion was his failure to find, anywhere, a return of the warmth that flowed from him.

 

Rhayader

 

Rhayader Goes to Town (Mp3 song sample)

 

Sanctuary (Mp3 song sample with narration)

One November afternoon, a child approached the lighthouse studio by means of the seawall.  She was an orphan girl from the village no more than twelve, slender, dirty, nervous and timid as a bird.  She was desperately frightened of the ugly man she had come to see.  Her name was Fritha.

 

Philip: What is it child?

 

Fritha: Are you the man that mends broken birds?

 

She edged forward.  The thing she carried in her arms was a large white bird, and it was quite still.  There were stains of blood on its whiteness.

 

Philip: It's a snow goose from Canada. But how in heaven came it here?  It's been shot the poor thing.  A bitter reception for a visiting princess.  We will call her, 'La Princesse Perdue', the Lost Princess.

 

Fritha

Fritha's visits, and the snow goose, had brought new meaning to Rhayader's life.  Through that winter Rhayader tended to his wild birds, and the snow goose mended slowly.  Often, Fritha would visit them, but when she left, he missed her.

 

Snow Goose

 

Friendship

 

Migration (Mp3 song sample with narration)

Time passed, then one June morning the great geese flocks were answering their timeless call to migrate, and with them went the snow goose.  Out of the clear sky came the high clear note of the snow goose.  The specks drifted northward, formed into a tiny "V", diminished, and vanished.

 

Rhayader Alone and Flight of the Snow Goose (Mp3 song sample with narration)

With the departure of the snow goose, ended the visits of Fritha to the lighthouse.  Rhayader learned all over again the meaning of the word loneliness.  The year aged, autumn cried her leaves to the ground

 

Daily, Rhayader watched the sea wall and the sky hopefully, waiting…waiting.  In mid-October the miracle occurred.  A gray northeast wind was blowing and the land was sighing beneath the incoming tide. Above the sea and the wind noises he heard a clear high note.  "Snow Goose!"  Fritha had heard it too and rushed to the lighthouse.  "Oh Philip were has he been?"

 

Preparation – Part 1 (Mp3 live at Harry Griffin Park 8/15/04)

It was the spring of 1940 and Fritha had now blossomed into a young woman.  When the snow goose was at the lighthouse, she came too, to visit and learn many things from Rhayader.  They sailed together in his boat that he handled so skillfully.  From him she learned the lore of every wild bird, from gull to falcon, that flew the marshes.

 

Preparation – Part 2

But the world was now on fire.  That year the birds had migrated early from the great marsh.  The whine and the roar of the bombers and the thudding explosions had frightened them. But the Princess had stayed.

 

It was night when Fritha next came to visit.  She found Rhayader feverishly preparing his boat to sail.  He must go 100 miles across the North Sea.  A British army was trapped, awaiting destruction at the hands of the Germans.  Every tug and fishing boat was headed across the sea to haul the men off the beaches to the transports that could not reach the shallows.  Dunkirk.

  

Fritha stood on the sea wall and watched as the sail glided nearly out of sight.  Suddenly from the darkness behind her came a rush of wind and something swept past her into the air.  In the night light she saw flash of white wings, black tipped and the thrust forward head of the snow goose.

 

"Go now, Princess.  Watch over him."

 

Dunkirk  (Mp3 live at Harry Griffin Park 8/15/04)

"We was roostin' on the beach like a lot of bloomin' pigeons.  Bombs blowing up, right and left, when a goose, a ruddy goose so help me, comes flyin' right out of the stink and the muck and the smoke of Dunkirk!  Ol' Jock, he says, 'It's the angel of death, it is.'  Then from around the bend, as calm you please, comes this little boat with a bent over man inside.  With his good hand on the tiller and his crooked one beckoning us to come.  All the while this ruddy goose was flying 'round and 'round up above.  The bent over man smiles up at the goose like he's known him a lifetime.   He grabs me by the tunic and with an, 'In ya go lad,' he pulls me in the boat.  I turned to ol' Jock and says, 'It's not the angel of death, it's the angel of mercy!'  I don't know who he was, and I never saw him again, but he was a good man, that chap."

 

Epitaph (Mp3 song sample with narration)

"I too saw a goose.  I was the admiral on the Kertish Maid transport pulling soldiers off Dunkirk.  At sunrise we spotted a derelict sailboat… a slumped over body in her.  Took on machine gun fire...and a goose, a tame one, sitting on the rail. Young Kettering spotted a mine off the starboard bow.  We blew it up with rifle fire. When we looked back at the derelict she was gone. Sunk...Chap with her. And the goose had flown up above, circled three times like a plane saluting, and flew off into the west.  Strange thing, that goose."

 

Fritha Alone (Mp3 live at Harry Griffin Park 8/15/04)

Fritha remained alone at the lighthouse on the great marsh, waiting for she knew not what.  Long before the snow goose had come dropping out of the crimsoned eastern sky to circle the lighthouse in a last farewell, Fritha knew that Rhayader would never return.  And so, when one sunset she heard a high pitched, well remembered note cried from the heavens, she came running to the seawall and turned her eyes to the sky from whose flaming arches plummeted the snow goose.  For a moment Frith thought the snow goose was going to land in the old enclosure, but it only skimmed low then soared up again 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 . . . forever.

 

Fritha faced the open sea and said what Philip had always known... but never heard...

 

"I love thee, Philip.  I love thee!"

 

Princess Perdue (Mp3 song sample)

 

Great Marsh - Outro