Category Archives: Work/life balance

Picking Up the Threads

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Pen, notebook and computer keyboard.

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 20th 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.

This is not the post I meant to write

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I was planning to write my next blog post about popular histories of returning British ex-servicemen, comparing Adam Powell’s Soldiering On and Simon Fowler and Daniel Weinbren’s Now the War is Over. At some point I will write this post, as there is a lot I want to say about the multiplicity of such books, what makes a book on a historical topic a ‘history’ and the challenges I am facing in trying to write The Return of the Soldier as something other than an academic monograph.

But…

Last week my husband was rushed into hospital. Since then, he has spent two days on the ICU in an induced coma and, while he is now conscious and on a ward, he is still very ill and will be in hospital for the foreseeable future.

It has, as you might imagine, been a surreal and often terrifying week for me and our two children. All our networks – family, neighbours, school friends, university friends, colleagues, the children’s choir – have mobilised to support us. People have offered to fly across the world to come to our aid. A network of medical professionals stretching from New Zealand to Colorado have been on call to provide expert advice at any hour of the day or night. We have been fed cheese and chocolate and tea, offered beds for night, provided with distractions, hugs and words of support.

We try, as far as possible, to carry on as normal in the knowledge that the NHS, always at its best in a crisis, is doing its utmost and keeping our husband and father safe. My son has spent three nights under canvas in the rain-sodden Lakes, doing his Duke of Edinburgh Gold practice expedition. My daughter has baked Mini Egg cookies. Piano has and will be played, hymns and anthems sung in Holy Week services. Life around us goes on, so it must, at some level, for us as well. I cannot let this derail my son’s aspirations for university, my daughter’s vital friendship groups.

But…

While I continue to survive and function at some level day to day, doing laundry, cleaning the house, organising the children so that they are where they need to be right now, ensuring that the hens are alive and well cared for, as far as work is concerned, I find myself in a place of suspended animation. With a few exceptions, all of which can remain in abeyance for the next few weeks, I have requested extensions for all project deadlines. My sample chapter of The Return of the Soldier and my messy first draft of the first chapter of Men and War remain half typed and three-quarters written respectively. Alwyn Turner’s A Shell-Shocked Nation, the next on my reading list, remains unread. I will get back to this work soon; there is part of me that is desperate to do so, to think about something beyond my own and my family’s immediate survival. But for the moment, all of this must wait.

As difficult as this week has been, its saving grace has been the knowledge it has brought me of how lucky I am. Six or seven years ago, three acquaintances of my generation lost their male partners within a twelve-month period, two to suicide, one to sudden illness. All had young children; all faced the challenges of a future shaped by profound loss with a grace and resilience I can only aspire to knowing that, however ill he is, my husband is alive and that is a gift.

So too is my children’s resilience and maturity in the face of this crisis. I would not have chosen to have the fact that my husband and I have managed to be ‘good enough’ parents demonstrated to me in this manner, but given that it has been, I am glad it is the case.

And as for those networks, that web of supportive relationships that is our safety net in the moment of freefall, the only words I have are not mine, but those of Dar Williams: ‘I’ll act like I have faith, and like that faith never ends/ But I really just have friends.’

There will be more blog posts in the near future. Writing this post has shown me that writing is going to help me to survive. In the meantime, we go on.

Hello again

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Last week I had a day haunted by my mother. It started with an unexpected email from a very old friend of hers with good wishes for the new year. Then there were the references to Jim Kitten’s work for Lyons’ catering arm in Matt Houlbrook’s The Song of Seven Dials which I am currently reading, prompting me to think about how the histories of migration and social integration my mother was mapping through her family history research in the final years of her life can engage with those Matt exposes in his excellent book. And finally my husband suggested that we watch Ben Stiller’s documentary about his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. My brother had recommended it to us over the holidays, on the basis that there were a lot of shots of the apartment building where we grew. The Stillers were our neighbours, quite literally next door, occupying 5AB while we were in 5D, sharing a back hallway for the bins and the emergency exit stairway.

The emotional gut-punch of the film for me, however, wasn’t so much the images of the distinctive awning at the corner of 84th and Riverside, and Riverside Park, or even the Proustian emotions evoked by pictures of the Stillers from the 1980s, familiar from regular encounters in the lobby of a building Ben refers to accurately as its own eco-system. Rather it came from the framing of the documentary not only around the hours of home video and tape recording that Jerry Stiller made and preserved, but the clearing of the apartment and its subsequent ‘staging’ by realtors for sale. Because, about a year before, the same thing had happened in my mother’s apartment following her death from pancreatic cancer in 2018. (I say my mother’s apartment because it was the place she lived for nearly forty years, raised her children and died. It was also my father’s apartment throughout my childhood, but he gave her full ownership when they divorced at the turn of the 21st century, after which she redecorated, making it very much her own.)

The number of ways in which my mother’s memory was evoked that day may have been rather more intense than usual, but the fact is that, that I am reminded of her  on an almost daily basis, even nearly seven and a half years after her death. I use her sewing scissors and cooking equipment. Some of her (many, many) books are now displayed on my bookshelves. I wear her earrings when I dress for professional speaking engagements in the hopes they will endow me with some of her skill in holding a classroom.

Her memory shapes other aspects of my professional life as well. Matt’s book is not the only work of history that I have read through the prism of my mother’s research into the complexities of the Gluckstein family, of which we are descendants. My responses to Laura King’s and Michael Roper’s books on the methodological importance of family histories have also been informed by her interest and the archive that she left me. Even more, my sense of myself as an academic has been shaped by the fact that my mother was, for many years, a teacher, and a very good one. Of the three main roles that 21st century academics are expected to undertake – research, administration and teaching – the last has always been the one I have had most difficulty embracing. While for many it is the primary role of a university lecturers, one which energises them and inspires their scholarship, for me it often feels like a duty that I will never be able to bear lightly or with grace. As a result, I don’t believe that I will ever have the skill, the creativity or the passion to inspire students as a truly great teacher (and I have had a few in my time) can. In short, I will never be as good at it as my mother was.

Why am I posting this now? Because, as of today, for the next eighteen months, I am in a position to be able to slough off the anxiety of never quite living up to my mother as a teacher as I attempt to fulfil the other ambition that we shared, to write full time. I am taking a sabbatical from Leeds to finish writing my next two books, a history of masculinity and warfare from 1750 to 2000 in global perspective, under contract with Polity Press, and a history of the social and cultural impact of First World War ex-servicemen on 20th century Britain, the book I have been trying to complete since the Men, Women and Care project ended in 2020. (It really is almost there; I have a central thesis and, I think, the right tone for a project that will be something more than an academic monograph).

But what I have realised in the past week, picking through the emotions arising from the reminders of my mother and her loss, as well as the fears that have surfaced as this change in circumstances grew ever closer, is that there are lots of other things I want to write as well – the history of Golden Age detective fiction and the world wars that has haunted me since I wrote my Phd thesis, a work of fiction that has been coming together, in fits and starts for nearly as long and, it turns out to my surprise, my take as a social and cultural historian of early twentieth century Britain on my family history. This last has been sparked in part by The Song of Seven Dials, which places Lyon’s in the context of the modernisation of London in ways which suggest further exploration of its creation as the family business of a complex family of Jewish immigrants could prove worthwhile, as well as by a request for information from my playwright cousin which prompted speculative questions about name changes by my ancestors. So yes, I might be ready to unpack the boxes in the office that are my mother’s archive and pick up the task of writing about her family which she never managed to complete herself.

I plan to reflect on my writing to some extent on social media (these days Bluesky rather than the site formerly known as Twitter), but not everything, particularly the family history, is suitable either for traditional publication or dissemination as a social media thread. All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that I will, once again, be reviving this blog as a space of record and reflection both on subject and process. Having tried to lay the groundwork for some effective writing habits through the semester of research leave I enjoyed at the end of 2025, I will use this space to keep me disciplined about writing something every day, as well as for exploring ideas as they emerge.

I hope you will join me as I shift gears and possibly course in this latest stage in my career as a historian and in the life of this blog.

    Accountability Revisted

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    Having reflected on the recovery of the past year on New Year’s Eve, the start of the new year seems a good time to revisit and report back on the plans I made a year ago. I have also updated with some plans for the coming year.

    Writing:

    1. Reviews: I completed and submitted both book reviews due in early 2024, and both have been published. I now have a review (over)due that was supposed to be written by September, but I didn’t receive the book until October. This will be completed in the next couple of weeks.
    2. Conference papers: I had to pull out of the conference on military welfare history as my injured knee made travel too complicated. The paper at the Academic Archers conference was well received, and I am contemplating proposing a follow-up (although not for this year’s on-line conference, sadly). I gave papers at a different conference on military history and, joyously, at the Dorothy L. Sayers Society annual symposium and helped organise a conference on military welfare history. In the coming year, I am already scheduled to give public lectures in February, June and November, and a conference keynote in February. I am also hoping to get to Austria for the Military Welfare History Network conference and to Greece for the International Society for First World War Studies conference, although I am not sure what, if anything, I will be writing for either.
    3. The big one: The book. Definitely did not get finished this year. In fact, I have made very little progress, with the one chapter that I have worked on significantly currently is a state of chaos that terrifies me. I have done some initial work on other chapters, and do have a clearer sense of what I am trying to do, but I need more space to sit with this work than I have at the moment or am likely to until the summer at least. Work continues.
    4. And the new project: The article on ambulance drivers never materialised, but in the spring I was approached by a publisher interested in a global history of masculinity and warfare. I have written a proposal and received encouraging feedback. I will be redrafting the proposal in the coming month. Should it be accepted, writing this will be the focus of my forthcoming research leave.

    Knitting:

    1. The cardigan that I started as a lockdown project still doesn’t have button bands, but I have bought the required wool from the supplier. It is next on the knitting project list. This may require another ball of wool from the supplier.
    2. Three family sweaters were all completed in 2024, although my son’s was finished in a huge rush on 27th December. Only my husband received Christmas wool this year, as he has requested a replacement sweater for one he has worn to death. I have already made a start on this and am making good progress as I still can’t ski due to the knee injury.
    3. And the new projects: I still haven’t come up with a project for the reclaimed wool from the baby blanket, but I have just offered to make a non-knitting friend a cable sweater. I will be knitting some swatches to test the gauge when I get home, and hoping she likes the colour. If not, I have a large stash of other colours, hopefully something suitable will be found. I also bought myself a copy of Margery Allingham’s Mysterious Knits (coincidentally by the same designer as my friend’s requested sweater) for my birthday and have bought myself a Christmas present of wool for one of the sweater patterns. So it looks to be a year of Kate Davies knits for me this year.

    Quilting:

    1. Autumnal quilt. I have not touched this this year.
    2. Alice’s Wonderland quilt: Completed, long arm quilted, bound and given to its intended recipient. I am enormously proud of myself and of it.
    3. Aurora Stars Tricolour quilt: Last year’s new project. I haven’t quite completed the quilt top, but hope to be able to do so in the next couple of months, having just ordered the backing and binding fabrics. However, there are…
    4. The new projects: Instead of wool, this year I gave my children the materials for their quilts, a full kit for my son, a BOM for my daughter. I have also built up enough of a fabric stash to start compiling the materials needed for my nephew’s quilt top. I will have a significant period to focus on these during my period of recovery from surgery, which will hopefully happen in the spring, but we will have to see how far I get with these.

    In the kitchen, the garden and the house:

    As ever, the annual events of the kitchen and garden recur.

    1. Marmalade. Successfully made, in spite of my impairment. The kits for this year’s batch are on order.
    2. Germination: One of the great achievements of last year was the completion of two big house renovation projects, an update to the family bathroom and the complete redesign of the utility room and office, a project that involved replacing the roof over that part of the house. This has given us not only a lovely space to work in (with, miraculously, enough shelf space for all our books!) but also a large space for potting and germinating. As the greenhouse still doesn’t exist, this will do for now.
    3. The front bed has been dug over, although too late to plant the intended bulbs. I will be putting in shrubs, including a gift from an old family friend, in the spring, Then I need to work out what to do with all the rocks that I removed as part of the process.
    4. Plant-based baking: The cinnamon rolls never did happen. I may try again this year.
    5. And the new project: Having completed the bathroom and office space, the next challenge is redecorating the rest of the house. I am hoping my husband will get around to laying the wood floor in the living room. My goal is to paint the front hallway so that we can finally hang the artwork that is currently occupying a corner of the spare room.

    As with last year, these are ambitious goals which will not be completed, but I fully intend that this year shall be different in terms of the pattern and pacing of my work across the different categories. There will be changes this year, some them scary, but all, I think, necessary to enable me to tackle the goals outlined above.

    The Recovering Year

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    I started 2024 in a hotel room in Italy in a full-leg brace, unable to walk. I am ending it in a hotel room in Colorado, still unable to ski and with an aching arm due to what I think may be tennis elbow. In between, I have swum 5 kilometers very slowly, spent more time in hospital than I really wanted, failed to make significant progress with my book projects and lost the ability to sleep through the night.

    So no, 2024 has not been an easy year. Much of it has felt wildly out of balance with long periods when I felt like the Red Queen in Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, running very fast to remain in one place offset by some blissful periods of doing very little other than reading Georgette Heyer novels. But it has been a year of recovery. This recovery has been physical. I am now back on both feet and even running again. It has taken a lot of physiotherapy on my ham string to get me there, with a lot more in prospect as I am now due to have surgery to repair my ACL in the spring.

    But there have been other things that I have recovered as well this year. One of them, thanks in part to those period of reading Heyer (among others), is my enjoyment of reading for its own sake. I never fully lost this, but this year I recovered the ability to read for pleasure without feeling guilty about all the other things I could or should be doing with the time. As the year has progressed, I have found more time for reading outside of holiday periods. This has been a gift, helping me to restore some of that balance that I have lost over the past few years.

    The other thing I have recovered, somewhat to my surprise, is my desire to write. Granted, I have done less writing for the books than I might have hoped. But in the final third of the year I wrote 60,000 words of lectures, an intense and oddly energizing project, particularly in retrospect. I wrote, and started to rewrite a book proposal, and wrote and submitted an ultimately unsuccessful fellowship application. Combined with the reviews I have been writing for this site (which I will post in the new year), I have started to feel as if I have found my voice again after a prolonged period of not being sure if I had anything to say, if I had the ability to say it, or if anyone would listen if I did.

    Those doubts do still assail me, particularly at 2 am and in relation to the big book project. The process of recovery is not complete, any more than the process of recovery for my knee is. It may never be, fully, but here, at the end of 2024, it does feel at least that I can see the direction I need to head. The current level of imbalance is unsustainable, just as the continuing instability of my knee is for the sort of life I want to live. There will have to be some big changes in the coming year to ensure that my recovery, physical and psychological, continues. These still feel a bit tentative. I am waiting for the exact date of my surgery and my other plans will have to wait until after that, probably for the second half of the year. But changes there will be in 2025, that I can promise.

    So here is to the recovered year just gone and a year of change and progress to come. Wishing you and yours all health and happiness for whatever the new year may bring.

    Accountability

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    Having noted in my last post that I ended 2023 with a number of unfinish projects, I thought I would start the new year listing those that I hope to make progress with if not actually complete over the coming year. This is not a resolution (I’m possibly a bit late for that on Epiphany), but rather a hope to the point of intention.

    Writing:

    1. Janaury/February: Two book reviews. I’ve read both books and have a good sense of what I want to say, but I have negotiated a bit more time for both of these as I know that I will get very little writing done once marking and postgraduate studentship applications come in in a couple of weeks.
    2. April: Two conference presentations.
      • Discussant on a panel in military welfare history as a sub-field. My contribution will be considering intersections with histories of disability and gender.
      • ‘The Playboy, the Father, the Scholar and the Brute: Ambridge Masculinities in Historical Perspective’ for the 2024 Academic Archers conference. I am very excited about this one, and can’t wait to start writing this properly. It has been a couple of years since I last attended an AA conference, which are some of the most fun out there.
    3. The big one: The book. This will definitely not get finished this year, but the goal is to end the year with at least a couple of full chapters in place, and possibly even an agent for it.
    4. And the new project: One of the books I’ve been reading for review has inspired me to think again about the status of ambulance drivers and non-combattant care-givers (or not). I think there may be a journal article in this, drawing together some of the material that I was only able to mention in passing in An Equal Burden.

    Knitting:

    1. The cardigan that I started as a lockdown project. I have finally built up the courage to steek it (successfully, I think), but now have to complete the button bands and grafting. This may require another ball of wool from the supplier.
    2. Three family sweaters. Every year for Christmas I give my husband and two children the wool for a new sweater, which I then knit for them. This year I began my husband’s before Christmas, intending it for his birthday, after last year’s effort ended up far too tight in the arms and chest due to a miscalculation. However, as I have chosen an extremely complicated fair isle pattern, it is taking considerably longer than anticipated. Thankfully, the children’s sweaters should be more straight forward, so I may actually complete these before the weather gets too warm to wear them this year.
    3. And the new project: Today’s clearout of the bathroom cupboards in advance of the builders arriving tomorrow disclosed the sad fact that the baby blanket my mother made when my son was born had fallen victim moths. So I spent an hour today unravelling it, ending up with approximately six 50g balls of lovely, soft DK wool which, for sentimental reasons, I would like to make into something new. I’m not sure what yet, but all suggestions will be gratefully accepted.

    Quilting:

    1. Autumnal quilt. My first full-sized bed quilt which I am very, very slowly hand quilting. Not one that I can see getting completed this year, but I would like to make more progress on it than I have done in the past 12 months.
    2. Alice’s Wonderland quilt: A Block of the Month project from Alice Caroline which I started in January 2022. All that remains is to attach the final four borders, after which I will take it to be long-arm quilted at my local quilt store. It is intended as a gift and I am not yet confident enough at hand quilting to take this aspect on (nor to do I have the time if it is to go to its recipient – currently age 4 – before they leave home for university).
    3. And the new project: Because I clearly can’t resist the siren call of the new project, I have signed up for another Alice Caroline BoM project this year. Hopefully this one will be a little bit quicker, now that I am more confident of my technique.

    In the kitchen and the garden:

    These are less unfinished projects from last year than annual events which come around every year. Nonetheless, they fall under the heading of projects, and very enjoyable ones, too.

    1. Marmalade. The making of this year’s batch will be made more interesting by my current temporary impairment relating to my knee injury, which requires brace and crutches and means I am only partially mobile.
    2. Germination: We still don’t have a greenhouse (a very long-term unfinished project), so some time in the next few months the window sills will start to play host to pots of seeds in anticipation of one of the summer’s main garden projects, the veg patch.
    3. The front bed: Yet another project that is now several years old. Having removed a hugely overgrown berberis, I now need to finish digging out all the stones to replant with a callicarpa and bulbs. This one, however, will have to wait until the weather improves.
    4. And the new project: For Christmas, my husband asked for and received a cookbook about plant-based baking. I may have rashly agreed to try making plant-based cinnamon rolls at some point…

    As I say, I won’t complete all of these projects, but I hope to finish some and at least make progress with the rest. Whatever else it turns out to be, 2024 looks to be a busy year.

    Why I haven’t been posting on my blog

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    I had all the best intentions. I was going to post regular on my –

    [‘Mummy, is my porridge ready?’ ‘No, can you get ready to do Joe Wicks, it will be ready when you are done.’ ‘Don’t want to do Joe Wicks.’ ‘You need some sort of exercise. If you don’t do Joe Wicks, I’ll have to take you for a long walk later.’ ‘Fine, I’ll do Joe Wicks but it’s so unfair. This is the worst day of my life!’ *loud stomping*]

    blog. I was going to write about the links between Covid-19 and the history of wartime medicine. I was going to write about the militarisation of medical language. I –

    [‘Mummy! He’s pushing me!’ ‘I’m not! She’s getting in my way!’ ‘For goodness sake! You stand there; you stand there. Face the television and watch what you are supposed to be doing!’]

    was going to keep a daily diary, an outlet for my anxieties, a record of the social history of –

    [‘Right, you go have a bath and you go practice your piano.’ ‘But he always has a bath first and do I have to do my piano?’ ‘I want to do my piano.’ ‘Fine. You do you piano and you have a bath.’ *5 minutes later* ‘That’s enough water! Please can you do that again – and don’t rush this time.’ *dramatic sighs all round*]

    corona virus, a boon to future generations of historians.

    But of course it hasn’t happened. Partly because –

    [‘Are you out of the bath? Dressed? Right, come do your piano please while your brother has a bath.’ ‘No!’ ‘You need to do your piano practice.’ ‘Want to do it later.’ ‘No, you are going to do it now.’ *stomping, followed by discordant banging on the keyboard over the sound of running water*]

    not a lot of what I have to say feels very original. The comparisons with the 1918 flu –

    [‘Time to get out of the bath, please.’ ‘What work do I have to do?’ ‘Do I have to do writing?’ ‘I don’t understand this maths.’ Can I work in my bedroom?’ ‘Not if you are going to listen to Harry Potter while you work.’ ‘But I work better listening to things.’ ‘Mummy, is strange a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, or preposition?’ ‘Go get you dictionary and look it up.’ ‘No! Why do I have to! This is too hard! I hate you!’ ‘Are there 180 degrees in a right angle?’ ‘I can’t answer you both if you talk to me at the same time!’]

    have been relentless, and the subject isn’t really my area of specialism. Discussing the resilience of medical caregivers –

    [‘Can I make coffee?’ ‘Go on then.’ ‘Mummy, what does this mean?’ ‘What does what mean?’ ‘This.’ ‘Which one are you talking about? Show me.’ ‘This one!’ ‘Which of these sentences is an example of a modal verb? Hang on, let me check what a modal verb is.’ ‘Here’s your coffee, Mummy.’ ‘Thank you, sweetie.’ *spends the next five minutes wiping up spilled coffee grounds, dripped coffee and biscuit crumbs* ‘What’s for lunch?’ ‘Soup.’ ‘Don’t want soup, we always have soup, why can’t we have pasta!’ ‘Because I can’t get pasta from the shops.’ ‘It’s not fair! I never, ever get what I want and you always get what you want!’ ‘Please just get on with your work.’]

    feels unnecessary with all the articulate voices of medical caregivers bearing moving witness to that resilience. Yes, there will come a time to –

    [‘I’ve finished my worksheets.’ ‘Have you done BBC Bitesize?’ ‘But the internet isn’t working.’ *checks internet connection* ‘Yes, it is, you just have to wait for the page to load.’ ‘Stupid computer! I hate you! – Oh, now it’s working.’]

    unpick the meaning of heroism as it has been applied to key workers, but I’m not sure that it has come yet. And as for my own stresses and strains –

    [‘I’m hungry!’ ‘Fine, I’ll get lunch. Can someone lay the table, please?’ *I lay the table* ‘If you’ve finished, can you put your dishes in the dish washer, please?’ ‘Do I have to? She’s not doing it!’ ‘She will do it when she finishes her fruit.’ *dramatic sighs* *I clear my dishes, wash up the cooking utensils, wipe down the table*]

    I’m certainly not the only parent struggling to balance working from home, home school and keep my family fed and exercised. I am not the only –

    [‘What do I do now?’ ‘Have you done Duolingo? Typesy?’ ‘Yes, yes.’ ‘Please can you tidy your room? Yes, you can listen to Harry Potter.’ ‘Where’s Dad?’ ‘He’s in the office, recording a lecture. Please don’t go in there – did you hear what I said? What are those things attached to the side of your head?!’ ‘Ears?’ ‘Well – use them!’]

    struggling with anxiety about how to support my children’s mental and emotional health when they can’t see their friends, when I don’t know if they will be able to go back to school this year, when plans to visit family, both in the UK and in the US are indefinitely on hold.

    And then there is the fact –

    [‘I’ll take them for a bike ride.’ ‘Great. Have fun.’ ‘Mum, Dad’s taking us for a bike ride.’ ‘Yes, he told me, have fun.’ ‘Mummy, we’re going on a bike ride.’ ‘Yes, I know.’ ‘Where’s my helmet?’ ‘Where are my shoes?’ ‘I need socks, don’t I?’ ‘Do you really want to cycle in that skirt?’ ‘Have you seen the bike shed key?’ ]

    that I am still at work. I am fortunate in not having had to scramble to put teaching on-line the way many of my colleagues have, but I have been supporting post-graduate students –

    [‘Has the mail come?’ ‘I haven’t seen the mail man since you last checked the mail ten minutes ago.’ ‘I’m going to check anyway to see if my Beano has come.’]

    who are anxious about funding, who can’t access vital archives, who are on the verge of submitting their dissertations and facing the prospect of remote vivas. I am still revising –

    [‘What do I do now? I’m bored.’ ‘Why don’t you read a book? No, not one of your Beanos.’ ‘I don’t know what to read!’ ‘Fine, let’s go to your room to see if we can find something in the dozens of books on the bookshelf.’]

    a REF impact case study, still working with a colleague to get the manuscript of a long-standing edited collection submitted to the publisher, still supervising –

    [‘Mummy – he pushed me off the swing!’ ‘Mummy – she won’t let me have a turn on the swing!’ *sounds of conflict from the garden*]

    my funded research project (although making very slow progress with any of the actual research myself). So I’m not getting very much writing –

    [‘Can I watch television?’ ‘In five minutes.’ ‘But, Mum – !’ ‘Five minutes!’ ‘Mum, can I watch television?’ ‘Okay, okay, fine, watch television.’]

    done, not even the book proposals I’m supposed to be writing, let alone anything else. Which is why I haven’t posted much on this blog.

    [‘Mum, what’s for dinner? I’m hungry!’]

    Uncertain and Afraid

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    I sit down to write this at a quarter past eight (GMT) on New Year’s Eve. As has become my habit, since I started this blog, I want to take the opportunity to pause, as so many others do at this time of year, and assess all that has passed since I last wrote such a post. Like many of those others, this time I will also be reflecting on the changes the past ten years have wrought. While I know pedants will point out that the new decade doesn’t start until 2021, as a mathematician’s wife I believe in the reality and power of zero, and the the changing of the third as well as the fourth digit of the year seems a good moment to plant a marker in time.

    Over the past six years, I have written about hard years, and harder ones. I have written about poetry, both that which has accompanied me since childhood and that which I have discovered more recently. I have written of my family and of my work, of triumphs and of troubles. I have tried, throughout, to write with hope. I hope this evening that, despite the title of this post, I can continue that tradition.

    So, how has the last decade been for me? Hard is probably the right word for it. In January 2010 I was the married mother of a young son with a PhD but no career. My first book had been published for just under a year. I lived in a rented house without a garden in a city that, after two and half years, I was starting to learn to call home. I had a loving family, many of them far away. I was teaching myself to bake bread and trying, for the first time since I was an undergraduate, to write fiction. I wasn’t sure where I was going or what I was doing.

    In the intervening years I have had my second child (a daughter) and written my second book. I have found and forged an academic career, winning two significant grants and moving from an ‘early career academic’ to a mid-career one. I have developed new skills as a teacher and public speaker. With my husband, I have bought two houses and sold one, both with gardens. I no longer live (although I still work) in the same city, but feel that yes, I have come home. I have gained a niece and a nephew (as well as an honourary niece and a goddaughter); I have lost both my parents. I have learned to cope with long-term illness in those I love best. I no longer bake bread but have become very good at preserving, particularly marmalade and sloe gin. I am teaching myself to quilt and am trying, for the first time in a decade, to write fiction. I sleep less and run (and shout) more. Robert Frost and W.H. Auden are still my favourite poets.

    So where does this leave me, on the cusp of the new decade, one which many people are hailing as holding the possibility of being the new ‘Roaring Twenties’? As a historian of that decade, I can’t but be ambivalent about such predictions. The Twenties, after all, were, for many, a decade marked as much by violence, displacement, disability, poverty, joblessness and illness as by bootleg gin, jazz and art deco styling. This was the decade of the British General Strike and the art of Otto Dix, of the Irish War of Independence (and associated Civil War) and the Scopes Monkey Trial. And there are enough echoes in both the politics and public discourse of the present to make me feel wary. Like Auden, writing about the following decade, I cannot help but feel ‘uncertain and afraid/ As the clever hopes expire / Of a low, dishonest decade.’ [1]

    This sense of uncertainty and fear is reflected in my feelings about my personal life. This coming year will see the end of the funding for my current project. I need to write up that research in some form(s) and work out what the next project is, and while I have some ideas for both, ideas which excite and enthuse me, I don’t have the energy I did a decade ago. I look back on the woman that I was and wonder how I could have achieved so much in such a short space of time. I can’t do that again, nor anything like it.

    As I say, I still love my subject. I want to read and to write and to teach and to talk about it. But I cannot do it in the way I have been. Grief, and family life, and private passions have become part of my being in a way they weren’t a decade ago. I am still learning how to live with the weight they bring, the space they occupy as a professional historian.

    So looking forward, for me I am not sure that the Twenties will roar. Instead, they will be slower, perhaps more considered, a time of conserving energy and prioritizing passions, of learning how to give of myself without losing myself. There will be more reading, and more writing, but probably more fiction and less history. There will, I hope, be a lot of gardening and cooking (although not immediately, as we are on the verge of ripping out and replacing our kitchen, an act weighted with a symbolic mixture of hope and frustration). There will be friends and family, new and old, near and far.

    I don’t know if those ambitions and expectations are as hopeful as those I have looked forward to in earlier years, but they are what I have to fortify myself against exhaustion, uncertainty and fear. However modest or ambitious, I hope your own hopes for the coming year and years are fortifying and fulfilling.

    Wishing you a very happy new year, one and all.

    [1] W. H. Auden, ‘September 1st, 1939’, lines 3-5.

    Writing/Not Writing

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    It is 3rd November. For the past week, I have been traveling with my children along the eastern seaboard of the US, visiting family members, including two very new additions in the form of my nephew and honourary niece. It has been a lovely, if exhausting half term, although I will admit that I am looking forward to spending some time away from my own children after ten days constantly in their company.

    Being November, it is also both NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month). My Twitter feed is consequently full of friends, acquaintances and stranger posting their daily word counts, preparation spreadsheets, planned chapter breakdowns and research goals. As in previous years, these glimpses of others’ creative processes are inspiring and seductive. They also make me extremely jealous.

    I would love to dedicate myself to a month-long writing marathon. It isn’t as if I don’t have plenty write, academic and otherwise. And I have been making some progress with all three academic projects, plus the two (yes, there is now a second) pieces of fiction that insist on intruding themselves into my creative brain space. But making the time and space to write every for a month? Ay, there’s the rub.

    One AcWriMo video on YouTube offers to teach you ‘how to bend space and time to your will this November! Or, failing that, strategies to make all this writing fit into the life that you actually have, not the one you think you should have.’ Which sounds perfect, but I’m not sure that being on the road across three cities in ten days with two primary-school-age children and five bags is quite the real life the presenter had in mind. Even if I had the room to sit and write once the children were asleep (generally impossible in a shared hotel room with the lights switched out), I simply have not had the mental capacity to do anything other than switch off at the end of the day. And while we do arrive home tomorrow (hopefully to a car waiting for us at the train station and meal cooked by my husband) the combination of jetlag and all the stuff that will need catching up on after a week off work make carving out writing space on a daily basis a challenge I simply don’t think I am up to.

    And yet here I am writing this. Nor has this trip been an entire void when it comes to making progress on various writing projects. A discussion with my sister-in-law has made me determined to actually complete the piece of fiction that I have made a 7,500-word start on, however long it takes. An afternoon walk around the monuments in DC in glorious autumn sunshine resulted in my finally working out what the Men, Women and Care book is going to be about, even if planning the actually outline was interspersed with tangential discourses on American history for the edification of my son. And the seven-hour train ride that we are currently embarked on as the first stage of our journey home looks to be providing a good opportunity to write not only this but also a bit more of the chapter on improvisation for the trade book on the RAMC that I am still determined to try to get an agent for.

    So I many not have set pen to paper for the first two days of November. My chances of completing 50,000 words of fiction in the next three-and-a-bit weeks are slim-to-none, much as I would love to do so. And I will continue to produce my academic writing fueled by deadline-induced panic rather than the allocation of dedicated time on a daily basis. Maybe NaNoWriMo or AcWriMo will happen for me next year. I am sure that I will have things to write when they roll around again. In the meantime, if you are taking up the challenge of either (or both) this year, I wish you the best of luck and may the words (and the hours) be kind to you.

    Three books (and counting)

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    My children finished school for the academic year today. Universities have been celebrating graduations. Emails about induction week are starting to circulate. It must be the start of the summer holidays.

    This summer, in between childcare duties, I have several projects to work on – a couple of applications, two articles to (re)write, a very overdue book review, some engagement events to prep for. But my main goal, as I keep telling people, is working out what my next book is going to be about. And the problem I have (which is a nice one to have, but no less problematic for that) is an embarrassment of riches. I have three possibilities but probably only the mental space and energy to concentrate on one of them. They are as follows:

    1) The book I need to write. This is the book I have promised the funders that I would produce from the Men, Women and Care project. It is a book about disability, masculinity, temporality and the life cycle; about care giving, emotions and gender; about the history of the welfare state, the family and the role of the individual in negotiating the spaces where the two overlap. It will be a very academic book, a book which will use words like ‘temporality’, ‘hegemony’ and even, if today’s reading is anything to go by, even ‘phenomenology’. It is a book that may, eventually becoming the articulation of the most significant intervention I will ever make into the historiography of masculinities and the First World War. At the moment, it is unfocused and under-researched.

    2) The book I have promised myself I will write. In January, I tweeted that my resolution for the year was to write the ‘trade’ version of my recent academic book on the history of the RAMC in the First World War. This one, I have done the research on. I also have a chapter and a half in draft, about five different plans of chapter breakdowns and a great deal of excellent advice from colleagues about how to approach this project. What I don’t have, yet, is either a clear, saleable thesis, or a proper strategy for finding myself an agent, which is very much the next thing I need to do to get this off the ground.

    3) The book I want to write. For years now I have been talking about doing a project on the representation of trauma in detective fiction – and I still want to do it, not least so I can write properly Ellis Peters’ George Felse novels. But, after talking about the project for so long without actually doing anything about it, I am starting to think there may be a less academic, more experimental book that I need to write first, about Golden Age detective fiction and contemporary novels set in the Golden Age, how both use images of and references to the First World War and what the differences between these two forms of the genre can tell us about gender, memory and commemoration. I’m pretty sure I have the argument for this one, and I find myself writing bits and pieces at odd intervals, but I also need to dedicate a lot more time to (re)reading the works of Jacqueline Winspear, Frances Brody, Kerry Greenwood, as well as some of the more obscure members of the Detection Club if this is going to be the book I really want it to be.

    So those are my options, three projects, all of which require time commitment in different ways. Alongside the continuing work needed for the final year of Men, Women and Care, the teaching and administration I’ve agreed to undertake and my family commitments, there is barely room for one of them, let alone all three! So I am looking for advice: which one of these do I prioritise this summer?

    (And the ‘and counting’? That would be the book I dream of writing – the detective novel in the style of Dorothy L. Sayers, with a plot based around an ex-servicemen’s association and post-war battlefield pilgrimages. Some day…)