Page 69 - Gullivers

It was a man I never met and I know little about, a man called Don Pedro
of Lisbon, who was the final arbiter of the fate of my family. It was he who
put it upon Father, as a matter of honour and conscience, as Father said, that
he ought to ‘return to his native country, and live at home with his wife and children.’ A great one for truth, honour and conscience was Lemuel Gulliver; that much is clear from his book. A great one, too, for grand statements: ‘Principally,’ he osten used to proclaim, ‘I hate and detest that animal called man; although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas.’ Many’s the time he undertook to prove his case by force of argument. However, the experiences of this particular John, his own son, did little to prove the truth of his fine dictum.
I eventually managed to escape the moral high tone of Father’s house
in Redriff, where the horses in the stables were accorded more dignity than the women and children of the household. Emmanuel College Cambridge did not beckon me, sadly, nor Oxford. Instead, I was lucky to be accepted in a minor institution on the godforsaken neighbouring island entitled Trinity College. There I was accorded a discreditable mark at the end of my studies, and my ‘dullness and insufficiency’ were the subject of some debate. Little wonder that I should conclude that my childhood became the type of all my future disappointments.
This is a fictional account woven around details from Gulliver’s Travels and from the life of Jonathan Swist.
III. Lemuel Gulliver’s Children 63