Vicerage morality, nursery discipline

… I just sat muching jaka*, but I couldn’t help listening to her, being reminded of that old harridan Lady Sale, tapping her mittened fingers while the jezzail bullets whistled round her on the Kabul retreat, and demanding acidly why something was not done about it. Aye. it’s comical in it’s way – and yet, when you’ve seen the mem-sahibs pursing their lips and raising indignant brows in the face of dangers and horrors that set their men-folk shaking, you begin to understand why there’s all that pink on the map. It’s vicerage morality, nursery discipline, and a thorough sense of propriety and sanitation that have done it – and when they’re gone, and the mem-sahibs with them, why, the map won’t be pink any longer.

*dried meat

Flashman's Lady, p.283, Pan edition, 1979.

Tags:Flashman, Flashman quotes, empire.

Terrible women

Terrible women, in their way – the mem-sahibs. But it would have been a different country without ’em – and I’m not sure the Raj would have survived the year ’57, if they hadn’t been there, interfering.

Flashman in the Great Game, p.134, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes,mem-sahib, Indian Mutiny.