Page 63 - Gullivers

into this world – the previous day the babe had responded to my customary scowl with a wisp of a smile - mother found her, unaccountably, cold and blue in her cradle. A cold rush of fury overtook me. Years later, when I read Father’s book and noted how he failed to mention a word about her beyond her imminent arrival as he departed, that chill tore my soul once more. I noted too his comment that ‘one half of our natives were good for nothing but bringing children into the world; and to trust the care of our children to such useless animals,’ he had continued, ‘was yet a greater instance of brutality.’ Indeed.
I don’t need to remind you of the details of his voyages. You are probably more familiar with them than I. Within days of his book being published in 1726, his tale was on the lips of high and low, from the housekeeper’s son’s to the little royal princesses’. But there are some details from Father’s ramblings that held a particular resonance for me, snippets that stayed fast in the memory of an impressionable, resentful, boy who was effectively fatherless. For instance, while
I laid plans for my own future at the dining table in Redriff, I couldn’t help but note that apparently inconsequential lads played an important part in the fantastic adventures of Father’s reports. Nameless young fellows with no voices – the kind one might scarcely notice on the streets of Redriff – actually steered the action and the actors of the famous voyages in one direction or another or were favoured by Providence. There was the nameless cabin-boy whom fate had arbitrarily and momentarily favoured. In 1710, as I recall, on the high seas my father had encountered a ship from Bristol captained by a man named Pocock. Father later learned that a storm cost the lives of all Pocock’s crew – except this solitary cabin-boy. Did the boy deserve his fate any more or less than his fellows who were lost? Or than I, the neglected offspring of a scowling, public man? Remember the Brobdingnagian pageboy who ambled off to filch birds’ eggs instead of caring for Father? Had he not done so, Lemuel Gulliver might never have relinquished the infantile comforts of the giant-land of Brobdingnag, and
I might never again have laid eyes on him. It took his light-hearted negligence of
III. Lemuel Gulliver’s Children 57