George Washington's Ghost

Dominion status had been mooted for the First Fifteen New England colonies as long ago as the 1880s, mainly in recognition of the role New Englanders had played in the victory of 1866. Had there been more enthusiasm – in the event there had been virtually no interest in the idea whatsoever then, or since baring that from a few eccentrics, like Isaac Fielding and his republican-leaning adherents – on the other side of the Atlantic, it might have happened without a great deal of fuss and bother, and more or less passed on the nod.

The trouble was the world, and New England had changed out of all recognition in the last hundred years. The process of settlement had exploded west from the historic colonies in parallel with the westward march of northern, Canadian expansion until now, the imperial writ ran from coast to coast, the bothersome South Western corner excepted. And with that unfettered expansion had come unstoppable economic growth that was now the well-spring of the whole Empire. The ‘final canalisation’ of the St Lawrence and the linking of the Great Lakes, completed only in 1955, financed almost wholly from grain and ore revenues mainly from Canada, to whom Dominion status had been granted as long ago as 1951, had literally, opened up the New England west to industry and agriculture, promoting a boom that had run out of control for the last twenty years.

Now, grain from the prairies west of the Mississippi had rendered the famines of Bengal, Rajasthan and the Punjab things of a past, dark era. And huge, sprawling frontier cities had sprung up along the shores of the Great Lakes, their never-ending hunger for labour drawing people from every corner of the Empire. It was hardly surprising that Philip De L’Isle sometimes grew so exasperated with the insularity and the westward ‘blindness’ of the ‘great men’ of the East Coast who were still so wedded to the old country, that they refused to glance over their shoulders at the ‘new’ New England conquering the fastnesses of their unimaginably bountiful continent...

“Um,” Eleanor declared philosophically, giving her husband a wry gaze, “you’ve got that faraway look in your eye, again, mein Liebe.”

The King grimaced sheepishly.

“Forgive me, my love, I was thinking about everything we saw when we were in New England a couple of years ago,” he confessed. “I don’t mean our time in the East. I was thinking more about those great factories, the steel mills, the row upon row of huge grain silos at Buffalo, and all those big ships plying their trade on the Great Lakes. And,” he shrugged, “travelling on that train across the prairies, sometimes rattling through endless fields of ripening wheat and corn from morning to dusk. And thinking, as inevitably one must, how little the people at home, or in the wider Empire, or in the First Thirteen, truth be known, and certainly not here, in the heart of Europe, understand that in New England there lies a sleeping giant…”

“I’ve invited Ranji to join us for luncheon,” Eleanor said, changing the subject in an attempt to raise her husband’s spirits. “Hopefully, you two can cheer each other up talking about cricket!”

The news instantly broke her husband’s preoccupation.

Major General His Highness Jam Saheb Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji III Jadeja of Nawanagar, was the flamboyant, raconteur grandson of the most remarkable cricketer ever to come out of the sub-continent.

‘Ranji’, like her husband – strangely, given that he had been a gunnery specialist, a thing requiring the finest imaginable exactitude – notwithstanding his unquenchable love of the summer game was a man almost completely lacking in hand-eye co-ordination when it came to holding a cricket bat or attempting to take a catch in the field.

Nevertheless, the Chairman of the All India Cricket Board of Control and the Honorary Life President of the Marylebone Cricket and Lawn Tennis Club, the arbiter of the laws and standards of both sports at Thomas Lord’s Field next to Regent’s Park, and the King were old friends from their school days at Harrow. Regardless of whatever else was happening in the Empire, they always fell straight into an animated debate about the state of their national summer games (Cricket and Tennis) and the perennial problem of what on earth their respective Cricketing elevens were going to do about the blasted all-conquering Philadelphians!

On that particularly sore topic, while now and then the Australians or the South Africans put up a gallant but doomed fight against the terrifying New Englanders – whose bowlers bowled like the wind and whose batsmen seemed to be wielding mighty tree trunks, not the matchstick forty to forty-five ounce bats of their foes – who time and again mercilessly reduced their foes to dispirited, often gibbering shells of the men they had once been…

Eleanor giggled.

Her husband had already brightened, shaken off his broodiness.