Lecture | Square Pigs in Round Holes: Veteran stories in the aftermath of the WW2

Professor Gill Plain will begin the talk by exploring the expectations placed on demobilised men, and the stories that popular culture told to make sense of their experience. These are stories of peacetime man-making that struggle to reconcile conventional risky ‘adventures’ with the needs of a postwar society preoccupied with domestic reconstruction, and frankly a bit worried that all the returning veterans would bring the violence of war home with them. It’s a world (still familiar) in which veterans rapidly go from being heroes to unwelcome problems that society would rather forget about. Gill will then look at a couple of case studies that reveal the different but related pressures facing disabled veterans. The first example is provided by a Scottish RAF officer, William Simpson, who wrote the story of his catastrophic wounding 3 times. Gill will reflect on why he felt the need to do this, and the pressures revealed by his autobiographies and then turn to a ‘group autobiography’, The Guinea Pig magazine, and use this to illustrate the strategies through which disfigured veterans found ways to survive, and in many cases thrive, in the postwar world.

Gill Plain is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. Her research has ranged across the twentieth century, from First World War women poets to the fictional serial killer boom of the 1990s, but she keeps coming back to the mid-century, and in particular to the literature, film and culture of the Second World War and its aftermath. Her books include Women’s Fiction of the Second World War (1996), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2001), John Mills and British Cinema (2006) and Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and ‘Peace’ (2013). Her most recent books are Prosthetic Agency: Literature, Culture and Masculinity in the Aftermath of World War II (2023), which explores narratives of rehabilitation in postwar film, fiction, biography and memoir, and Agatha Christie: A Very Short Introduction (2025).

6.30pm Drinks Reception (Drink included in ticket price), 7.00pm Lecture Commences

£12 non members | £10 Friends