Sad, sweet song of a migratory bird

The Godwits Fly, Robin Hyde’s bewitching novel about a girl in 1930s New Zealand, hints at the author’s own short life

Godwit: it sounds like a word from Roald Dahl or JK Rowling, but is actually a small migratory bird that spends part of its year in New Zealand and the rest in Siberia. If this sounds knowledgable, I’m bluffing: I only learned these facts the other day when I read The Godwits Fly, a novel by Robin Hyde, who uses the birds as a symbol of the longing many New Zealanders felt – at least in her day – for England, the place they still thought of as home.

Hyde, whose real name was Iris Wilkinson, was also unknown to me, though in New Zealand she is, it seems, now considered a major writer. It was her story to which I was drawn first.

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