Me? Doing a Masters?

I think it's a fair shout to say I haven't had the best start to doing my MA.

I signed up on July 27th. On July 29th, my mum became critically ill. I debated whether to defer for a year. I debated whether to do it at all. The more I read about the course, the more I wanted to do it.

I've been interested in social history for ever. I've spent the last year working on family trees for me and my friends, and become intrigued by family structure particularly in rural areas. I've got a talent for creating narratives from primary evidence, for constructing strong arguments, for finding links that aren't immediate obvious and for holding vast stores of intricate genealogy in my head. Local history extends this into the landscape - who lived where? Why did they live there? What did they do? What did they earn? How were they linked? How does this compare to other areas? It's a natural step up from family research and it appeals to my soul.
Then there's my mum. Mum loved social history. She was fascinated by the rise of leisure time in the Victorian era, and the link to the railway network and how resorts were created to supply demand. Having experienced the stigma of being a single mother in the sticks, illegitimacy interested her. Coming from a big family, and having one herself, she read about other big families. She encouraged me. We would talk about history more than almost anything, monologuing at each other on the phone for hours. When I did the preliminary tests for getting on the MA, one of the questions was on the rise of Blackpool. Mum was a bubbling torrent of information on it when I told her. I am devastated that she's not here to talk to about it all anymore. She didn't want me to do the MA when I first discussed it with her, way back in June. She thought I should go directly into writing (my eventual aim) so she could read it. But I didn't feel qualified to write about it without a single history qualification to my name.

So, I decided to do it anyway. My start date was 1st October, by which point my mum was nearing her end. I worked hard but sparingly. It is terribly difficult to focus when the person you need most is dying. You think about little else. You worry. You want to be with them. You don't particularly want to be reading about tiny Highland communities in 1780. Or doing anything really. It's hard. But I did it.
Then she died. She died and I had a deadline. I postponed the deadline, but I still knew it was coming. Everything I had studied before fell to fog. And since she died, every time I read something she would have loved to know about, I feel a stab. It's not fair.

So I wrote my essay. I struggled a bit, just to get my thoughts in order (complicated by having a general anaesthetic a few days before) and then to write it, to use a whole new system of referencing, and to write about something I've not really done before. There is a lot of crossover between modern history and sociology, but they require different styles, and the essay was theoretical. I got it in. I got 63%, which is far more than I hoped for. It was not easy to write, but I found my style and voice much faster than I ever have before.

Now I'm looking to my next essay, getting to grips with the vast amount of potential literature on offer, and having to decide for myself what is and isn't relevant. Before I began this, some mansplaining dick told me that there was 'lots of reading' involved in an MA. I was pissed off because...well duh, but it's the quality of reading that counts. History perhaps generates the most written material of any subject, and some of it is diabolical quality, and some of it is absolutely essential, and some of it is absolutely essentially and like wading through treacle. And you have to decide what's good. I am currently sitting with no less than six relevant books, another two on the laptop to work through, countless potential journal articles that might be useful. I might only use one paragraph from each book, but I need to find it. Your undergrad is SPOON-FED to you in comparison to this.
And I daresay for those who go on to do a PhD, a masters is equally spoon-fed.

I love writing history. I love writing, full stop, but history is a particular pleasure. Telling the story of people who lived long ago, who never hoped to be historically relevant, who did nothing to immortalise themselves. That's a privilege. Finding their stories, hidden in the records, and understanding their context. That's my favourite thing. Reading ancient newspapers is much better for the soul than reading facebook. I don't know if I can actually making a living doing this - probably not, the world is awash with historians and you have to be pretty fucking ace to get published - but even if I can't, I will try. I will try for my mum. I will try for myself.