Page 54 - Gullivers

John Gulliver writes as follows:
I was always a ‘good’ child and my father proudly used to call me his ‘towardly’, or promising, Johnny. That was, of course, before the gloom set in and he turned against us all. He was pleased enough when I did well at grammar school. And when my sister Betty and I were little, he used to take great pride
in Betty’s needlework. She was never one for the books, but she was – still is - kindly and good-natured, and a great consolation to her mother. Those better equipped to judge appliqué embroidery than I were known to comment on her extraordinarily imaginative and exotic patterns and her attention to detail...
In those early days, our little family took Father’s travels in good part - or at least I thought I did. Yet, embedded deep in my memory are scenes that now stir some doubt in me. I am reminded of a few occasions when mother thought we had retired to bed, and I came upon her staring through the drawing-room window, convulsed in tears. ‘You’re a good boy, John,’ she had wept on one such occasion, stroking my arm, ‘You deserve a father like every other boy.’
I knew full well that not every boy had a father any more than I: Billy Palmerston’s was an army captain away in service, and Charles Ford’s had died
of diphtheria when we were eleven; the family fortune - and poor Charlie’s prospects – were much narrowed as a result. I suppose I was thankful to Father that we were never lest short. (Once I mentioned this in passing to Mother
and she sniffed in disagreement. ‘Humph!’ she said, ‘If he hadn’t had my dowry
it might have been an entirely different story!’) Later I realised that Father’s fortunes had flourished and that there was no economic necessity whatever for him to take off on his preposterous travels. That discovery, added to the niggardly feeling that Father was leaving to escape from us, not to support us, did little to instil self-worth in me.
I now realise how scanty are the memories I have of my father, and that in itself tells something. Those impressions that I have are coloured with more vivid and turbulent feeling than ought be expressed in polite society. But I beg you to
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