Reading

During World War I, the manor house of Henry's family was converted into a hospital for wounded officers, and the eleven-year-old observed at first hand the disparity in manners between his family and the generally low-bred officers. The behavior of these men was so uncouth that the senior officer had to take measures to prevent abuses of hospitality. "In this way," says Green, "manners were ruled by discipline and so they became something else, bad manners became an offence against authority and in this way at once came near to what I knew at my private school". 

The significance of his relating military and school discipline rests in the youth's grasp of the foundation of manners. If regimen is their source, it occurs to the boy that his own class may be impeccable only because its members have been subjected to the same pressures earlier, and for more extended periods. His apprehending this possibility led young Henry to evaluate his elders during war-time. Those frantic officers who, convalescent, swam rivers to get to girls, were only obeying crude instincts of self-preservation ; and members of the "trained up" class who gave them hospitals were really doing nothing more, although their instincts may have been blurred by refinements. "In the war said Green, "people in our walk of life entertained all sorts and conditions of men with a view to self-preservation, to keep the privileges we set such store by, and which are illusory, after those to whom we were kind had won the war for us".The privileges he mentions are, of course, those of class boundaries and all they entail, boundaries staked out on the theory that manners determine real differences between groups. The "forced atmosphere" of war, placing the bumpkin officers in sight of the wellborn among other things, gave opportunities "to every child," says Green, "to see the cracks in the façade people put up before children in my circumstances". The four novels that follow Blindness Living, Party Going, Caught, and Loving all chisel into the cracks in the façade; and only in Caught, at the cost of deep suffering, is a member of the privileged class able to make a meaningful commitment to members of a lower class. 

The other important experience of Green's youth has to do with the problem of communion and alienation. It is best illustrated in Pack My Bag by two episodes, one at the country house hospital and the other some years later at Eton. The former exemplifies one of the emotional bulwarks of the book Green's belief that bonds forged between persons impel growth as no other force can. It concerns an Australian soldier, ruined by the war, whom Henry's mother tended, and who later committed suicide aboard the ship that was taking him home. When it seemed this man was getting better, he asked Henry to go bicycling with him: 

We got to where the road goes round the church and then we came back. He was soon wobbling but he would not get off to rest until when we got into the drive he could just get off his bike and zig zag into the house not wishing I suppose that I should see him fall. He was up again in four days . . . but it damaged me . . . because it was not until then I realized by sharing it with him, how hopelessly far gone he was.

John Russell’s Henry Green: Nine novels and an unpacked bag is available, free of charge, on archive.org