Free and easy style

. . . my bootneck sergeant scowled disapproval; he wasn’t use to the free and easy style of these Navy youngsters who couldn’t help bring their fifth-form ways to sea, and treated their men more like a football of which they were the captain, than a crew. It was natural enough: the cornet or ensign in the Army, when he joined his regiment for the first time, entered a world of rigid formality and discipline, but here was this lad just out of his ’teens with a little floating kingdom all his own, sent to fight slavers and pirates, chase smugglers, shepherd pilgrims, and escort the precious bullion on which a whole British army would depend — and not a senior to turn to for advice or guidance, but only his own sense and judgment.


Flashman on the March, p.17, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, navy.

Flashman and the rules of rugby

They were the rummest lot, though; when they tired of devising means of execution they got into a great argument about whether hacking and carrying should be allowed in football, and as I was an old Rugby boy my support was naturally enlisted by the hackers – it must have been the strangest sight, when I come to think of it, me in my garb of hairy Pathan with poshteen and puggaree, maintaining that if you did away with scrimmaging you’d be ruining the manliest game there was (not that I’d go near a scrimmage if you paid me), and the white-bearded wallah, with the blood splashes still on his coat, denouncing the handling game as a barbarism.

Flashman in the Great Game, p.188, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes, rugby.

Flashman on swots

Pious, manly little villains of the type I used to oppress myself in happier days – Tom Brown could have made a football side out of ‘em, I don’t doubt, and had them crying ‘ Play up!’ and telling the truth fit to sicken you.

Royal Flash, p.151, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1978.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes,manly, villains.