Don't mend as quickly

           When you’re past the fifty mark, you don’t mend as quickly as you used to. For on thing, you don’t want to; where once on a day you couldn’t wait to be off your sick-bed rampaging about, you’re now content to lie still and let any handy ministering angel do their stuff. When I was a brat of a boy I went through hot hell in Afghanistan, had a fort collapse on me, and broke my thigh—a few weeks later I was fit enough to gallop an Afghan wench with my leg in a splint and old Avitabile egging me on, and get beastly drunk afterwards. Not at fifty-three; if they’d paraded the Folies Bergère past me a month after Little Bighorn I’d have asked for bread and milk instead, and damn little of that in case it over-excited me.

Flashman and the Redskins, pp.330-31, Pan Books edition, 1983.

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His name was Avitabile

…none was uglier or looked readier for mischief than the governor of the place [Peshawar], a great, grey-bearded ox of a man in a dirty old uniform coat, baggy trousers, and a gold-tasselled forage cap. He was Italian of all things, with the spiky waxed moustache that you see on organ-grinders nowadays, and he spoke English with a dreadful dago American accent. His name was Avitabile, and the Sikhs and Afghans were more scared of him than the devil himself…



Flashman, pp. 81-82, Pan edition, 12th printing, 1979.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,Avitabile,Italian.