The vain regrets of youth

…if I’d been like Jack Merry or Dick Champion, or any of the other plucky little prigs that Tom Brown and his cronies used to read about, setting off to seek my fortune on the bounding wave, I’d have brushed aside a manly tear and faced the future with the stout heart of youth, while old Bosun McHearty clapped me on the shoulder and held me enthralled with tales of the South Seas, and I would have gone to bed at last thinking of my mother and resolving to prove worthy of my resolute and Christian commander, Captain Freeman. (God knows how many young idiots had gone to sea after being fed that kind of lying pap in their nursery books.)
    Perhaps at twenty-six I was too old and hard-used, for instead of a manly tear I did another manly vomit, and in place of Bosun McHearty there came a rush of seaman tailing on a rope across the deck, hurling me aside with a cry of ‘Stand from under, you bloody farmer!’, while from the dark above me my Christian commander bellowed at me to get below and not hinder work. So I went, and fell asleep thinking not of my mother, or of the credit I’d bring my family, but of the chance I’d missed in not rogering Fanny Locke that afternoon at Roundway Down. Aye, the vain regrets of youth.

Flash For Freedom!, p.47, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1980.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,Jack Merry, Dick Champion.