Page 64 - Gullivers

duty to return Father to his adult senses, or what he had lest of them. It was while the pageboy pursued his mischievous plans, that Father, lest unattended, was plucked by an eagle from his infantile security in Brobdingnag, dropped into the ocean and rescued by an English ship. And thus he found his passage home for
a brief respite.
Then there were the boys who climbed the masts and sighted land (one
such is the boy who discovered Brobdingnag). What power those lads held! As much as – perhaps even more than – the captains of their ships! It was they who decided on the course of the venture; their cries of ‘Land ahoy!’ or their carelessly overlooking distant shores made all the difference. It seemed to me that although Father mentioned them in passing, it was as if he was hardly ever aware of their existence. From his perspective, they were incidentals, as important as any other piece of machinery on the ship, but of as little consequence. Yet, to them we owe the bones of the Gulliver story. I recall, too, how Father sometimes mused about what wars might have been averted had not a little royal Lilliputian unidentified to history cut his finger when topping his egg. Father’s reflections on this matter led me to parallel speculations: would the wars of the Big-endians and the Little- endians have seemed less ludicrous to him had they been predicated on a gash
to an adult, rather than a childish, finger? It seemed as if children’s agency was ridiculed. What all this taught me was that we are all the stars’ tennis balls, but that chance alone seems to govern especially the destinies of children.
See how it altered the life of a nine-year old simple farmer’s daughter from Brobdingnag. The effect of meeting my father was that Glumdalclitch, a mere child, acquired wisdom and responsibility beyond her years. In her dealings with my father, adult-child roles were, ironically, reversed. My father was transformed into a plaything, a docile passive creature, anxious to please an inconsequential country child. She became a nurse, a servant, a confidant, a teacher of manners and languages, a protector of my father’s dignity and modesty... Father, the great explorer, the great rationaliser, was literally and metaphorically tied to her
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