In this World War II story, a friendship blossoms between a misshapen artist and a little girl who brings an injured snow goose to his lighthouse for healing. As she grows up, their friendship deepens, but before it can change into something more, Philip answers the summons to Dunkirk. Though the snow goose acts as a beacon and guide for the Allied Forces, Philip does not come back.
Written by Peter Gallico, this book has been around for a while now (it was first published in 1941) but only relatively recently (2007) was a new edition with Angela Barrett’s illustrations released. Haunting and bittersweet, it's not a typical Barrett setting, but she captures the desolate beauty of the marshlands and the stark, silently urgent spectacle of the ships crossing the Channel to the lines of waiting soldiers.
But the book's most striking image is that of Frith, now a young woman, returning to the lighthouse and retrieving a portrait Philip made of her when she was still a little girl. She sits on her knees, head bowed over the portrait, every line demonstrating her loneliness and heartache.
We cannot see the portrait itself, nor any of the others stacked against the walls, and the empty doorway behind her conveys a house that has been emptied of life. Philip lives on in his artwork, but they remain unseen to our eyes – perhaps foreshadowing the lighthouse’s destruction by a German bomber.
It's a depiction of love that was cut short before it ever had a chance to ever articulate itself. If you saw this illustration completely out of context, you would still feel its sadness and the sense of something irretrievable having been lost: Frith's childhood, her love for Philip, and the artist who was shunned by society for his physical disfigurement.
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