War & Peace Quote by Brian Lumley

There’s a sly modesty in Lumley framing writing as a “hobby” while he’s in the Army, a setting built on obedience, routine, and externally assigned identity. The line performs a quiet two-step: it downplays artistic ambition (a useful social camouflage in a hyper-masculine institution) while hinting that the real self was already forming off-duty, in the margins. “Now” sets up a before-and-after, inviting us to read the military not as destiny but as prologue: an era when life is owned by someone else, and creativity has to be smuggled in under the harmless label of leisure.

The subtext is less “I dabbled” than “I survived.” Calling writing a hobby can be a protective strategy against ridicule, against the suspicion that imagination is softness, or against the fear of admitting you want something bigger than your uniform allows. It’s also a craft story: hobbies are where repetition happens without the pressure of a brand, an audience, a career. In that sense, the Army becomes an unlikely writing workshop - not because it nurtures art, but because it forces a discipline of its own: stolen time, strong observation, gallows humor, the constant awareness of systems and rules.

Context matters: a mid-century British writer coming of age through National Service-era assumptions would know that the “serious” life is service and work; the “hobby” is what you’re permitted to love. Lumley’s sentence winks at that hierarchy, then quietly overturns it.