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They’ll have Donald Duck and Goofy and the gang on the wallpaper ready for the first arrival in the nursery, the boy who would be conker champion, and the signed baseball bat and mitt, and his granddad’s fighter plane suspended from the ceiling. And he’ll coach him in baseball, and Phineas in cricket, and Owain will teach him to fish, and later shoot. Phineas would be one godparent, he’d decided, and Annie and Owain, and Jasmine, and the Commander and Priny, and Miss Wyndham and John Beecher, and Tom Parr, there’ll be plenty to go round, enough new trees over the years.
And they’ll grow up, their brood, like Jasmine’s and the Owens’, and there’ll be all the Hall and the grounds to chase each other round in, and the river to explore, and picnics on it, and trips to its hidden places, and all that English countryside, and the half that was in Wales, to play in.
Humphrey clamped his cigar in his mouth, and scattered sheep feeding by a field gate with a couple more blasts on the horn, singing his way down Batch Valley.
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