The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico: The Novel Cure for hurting someone's feelings

Gallico's haunting tale of love and loss on the desolate Essex marshes lingers in the mind

Haunting tale: Author Paul Gallico in 1929 (Corbis)

Ailment: Hurting someone's feelings

Cure: The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico

Those who wear their hearts on their sleeve will let you know soon enough when you've hurt their feelings. But those who instead withdraw, and lick their wounds in private, may just leave you with a niggling sense that you're no longer as close as you were. Avoid such erosion of friendships – and fine-tune your antenna to those you may have inadvertently wounded – with Paul Gallico's haunting tale of love and loss on the desolate Essex marshes.

Artist Philip Rhayader has made his home in a disused lighthouse because of his love for "wild and hunted things" – the gulls, teal, curlews and geese that come down from Iceland each October in great, honking skeins. But also because of how others treat him. Hunchbacked and with a deformed wrist, he knows that people find him grotesque. Rather than be hurt when his warmth is not returned, he opts to live apart.

One day Frith, an uneducated village girl, as "eerily beautiful as a marsh faerie", appears at his door with a wounded bird. It's a snow goose from Canada, blown off-course then shot by hunters. He takes it in, and Frith returns the next day to see how it's faring. Over the winter months, they care for the bird together. When the goose flies away the following summer, so does Frith; but each winter both goose and girl return. The years pass, and a deep emotional charge builds between them. But it's only when Rhayader hears of the soldiers marooned on the beaches of Dunkirk and sets sail to join in the rescue that Frith realises how she really feels about him.

As a sentimental story of first love, The Snow Goose will break your heart – for Frith and Rhayader, and for the snow goose, loyal to the end. But it's Rhayadar's fierce compassion for others – undimmed by the cruel treatment he's received – that lingers in the mind. Let it trigger a corresponding sensitivity in you.

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