My husband came home from hospital last week. He is still on heavy medication and convalescence, when it comes, will take a long time. But in the meantime, I no longer have to make the hour-long round trip to the hospital every day so, with the time regained I am starting to pick up the threads of my historical writing.

As a result, the first chapter of The Return of the Soldier now exists as a discrete file on my computer and is nearly 5,000 words long. It has a central argument, logical connections between points, and a clear direction towards the 2,000 or so words I still need to write about personal experiences of living in interwar housing. And, at the moment, I hate it. It feels unoriginal, overstuffed with facts, overly reliant on familiar sources, top-down in approach. While part of me knows that this draft is better than the wordy, overly complex mess that was the previous iteration, and that these feelings are to be expected as part of the process (Chapter 1 of An Equal Burden was almost exactly as painful to write for the same reasons), part of me, the emotionally exhausted part, remains frustrated and questioning what the hell I am doing.

I tell myself to be kind to myself, that I have been through a deeply traumatic experience this past month, one that is on-going. I reassure myself that something is better than nothing, that little and often is making a difference. But I remain torn, between the desire to stop and set this chapter aside until I know what I am doing with it and the need to finish it, to get those elusive couple of thousand words on a page, words that I hope will clarify what this chapter is doing beyond rehearsing other people’s arguments and providing lots of names, dates and facts.

Which brings me to the article recently published by Craig Fehrman, author of a new history of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which I recently stumbled across. In it, Ferhman describes how his own recent traumatic experience, of being mauled by a neighbour’s dog, changed his approach to analysis in This Vast Enterprise. ‘Historians and nonfiction authors,’ according to Fehrman, ‘often glide over lived experience. They prefer actions, citations, details, dates.’ On the one hand, I have some sympathy with this view. It is, after all, exactly the approach I have taken so far in my current chapter. On the other hand, it is exactly this that is making me hate my chapter so much. Because by instinct and practice, as a historian I have always focussed on lived experience, rather than seeking to glide over it.

It is always slightly disconcerting to read work by professional historians (that is, those who communicate historical research in order to earn a living) that identifies a methodological approach or source base that I have long been familiar with as a new discovery. Here, Fehrman appears to discover the methodology of close reading of personal narratives and the debates central to histories of subjectivity and emotions. ‘[M]y best discoveries,’ he writes, ‘came from reading … journals closely.’  At the same time, he acknowledges that ‘no matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to access fully the bodies and minds that survived this expedition.’ I could have made both these statements when writing Men of War and, indeed, spend a good deal of time in the introduction working through the problem of just how much I could claim about men’s feelings in the past (pages 7-12 if you are interested). And, in the decade and a half since I published the book, I have taught innumerable introductions to gender and cultural histories introducing undergraduates and postgraduates to these discussions.

Fehrmann is not an academic (although he appears to have started work on a PhD), has a book to sell and is writing for an online platform specialising in culture and sports writing. There is no reason why he should (and some pretty good ones why he shouldn’t) have detailed knowledge of or engagement with some of the more abstruse aspects of historiography and historical methodology. But his article caught my attention not so much because it addresses questions of the relationship between personal trauma and the writing of history that feel particularly pertinent to me at the moment, but rather because the claim to originality that Fehrman makes goes to the heart of my discomfort with my current chapter. As much as I know that I do have something original to say about the importance of returning ex-servicemen to 20^th century British society, I am also aware of how many social histories of Britain exist, not least histories of Britain in the two decades after the First World War. What on earth am I doing that will add anything new to what has already been said? And how can I do it in a way that is both informative and entertaining?

These were questions and fears that I was already facing when my husband got ill. Now I have to work out how to tackle them as I also face the challenges of caring for a recuperating invalid, two teenagers and four hens. These challenges will, I suspect, make it a different book from the one it would have been had my husband not fallen ill, just as for Ferhman, ‘Something changed in my book because something changed in me.’ I am still to close, both to the writing process and the trauma, to have any clear sense of what that change may be. For the moment, however, I think the answer to my questions may be not change but more of the same. I need to return to those familiar methods of close reading of subjective experiences of the past. It is, after all, the men who returned and the families and communities that they returned to, that are the subject of this book. Having been forced to concentrate on other things for the past month it is, I think, time to spend a bit more time thinking about them and their lives again.