Green sees how the war is disturbing and confusing a still-fiercely hierarchical society. Mary, who cooks for the firemen, thinks that the war is “all on account of the rich, they started it for their own ends. Now everything’s topsy turvy.” Roe is given the mocking nickname “Savoury” (after Savile Row, the street for expensive tailoring); Pye openly envies Roe’s private resources and contrives to go to the same pricey nightclub as the aristocrat. Roe compensates, as best he can, by regularly paying for everyone’s drinks at the pub, and by attempting, not very successfully, to make his speech sound like that of his fellow firemen. For when Roe and the working-class Shiner find themselves alone one day in the pub, they are almost unable to communicate: “They had neither of them come across anyone in the least resembling the other.”

Green is not obviously ideological, unlike say, Evelyn Waugh, who in Brideshead Revisited—published in 1945, the same year as Green’s country-house novel, Loving—explicitly laments a postwar egalitarianism he fearfully foresees. In Green’s softer world, class relations may be shifting, but perhaps they are really just staying the same, confirmed in their stasis by merely minor turbulence. It is hard to tell, so strongly does Green’s work swerve away from didacticism of any kind. The same can be said for relations between men and women, which consume this book. It is striking how utterly men and woman fail to communicate with each other in Caught. And it is striking that both Pye and Roe, who have so little in common, share what Green calls “the shared, woman-hunting cause.” Both Pye and Roe have a need for women and a lack of interest in them that can seem, to a contemporary reader, misogynistic. The war, as the novel makes clear, opened up erotic opportunities for both sexes; Roe and Pye avail themselves of their new chances with a somewhat unnerving relentlessness. Indeed, Green likens Pye’s lust to a kind of “fury.” But if war is sex, then sex is also war. For Pye and Shiner, women are called everything but women: “ ’omework,” or “skirt,” or “them,” or “the ladies, the birds, the lovely bits of grub.” When Shiner meets Roe’s wife, he thinks to himself that she’s “a smashing lump of stuff.” Pye (like Charley Raunce, again) is easily intimidated by women; Roe, unintimidated, seems merely to use them for erotic convenience. At the end of the book, Roe argues with Dy, and complains that “you get on my bloody nerves, all you bloody women with all your talk.” There is a male assumption here that the book fearlessly explores but with which, at times, it also seems complicit: women as the spoils of war, and women as the ones who spoil wars, by challenging male codes of stoical reticence and same-sex camaraderie.