Harrowing preferences

“I wish to have him educated at a great English school, such as one I have heard of . . . Harrah?”
     “Harrow? Certainly not your majesty. Lair of Bestial. Parvenus. Rugby’s the place for your lad . . . ”

Flashman on the March, p.208, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, school.

The death of Scud East

     East gave a little ghost of a smile, and his hand tightened and then went loose in mine – and I found I was blubbering and gasping, and thinking about Rugby, and hot murphies at Sally’s shop, and a small fag limping along pathetically after the players at Big Side – because he couldn’t play himself, you see, being lame. I’d hated the little bastard, too, man and boy, for his smug manly piety – but you don’t see a child you’ve known all your life die every day. Maybe that was why I wept, maybe it was the shock and horror of what had being happening. I don’t know. Whatever it was, I’m sure I felt it all the more sincerely for knowing that I was still alive myself, and no bones broken so far.

Flashman in the Great Game, p.233, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

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.