During the 1930s he briefly tutored the young son of the publisher Jonathan Cape, but devoted most of his time to writing short stories about working-class life in the industrial North.
Called up in 1940 (he was anti-war but did not become a conscientious objector to spare his mother's feelings), he was posted to what was then Ceylon,[2] where he edited a magazine for the Ceylonese forces titled Veera Lanka, which was published in both Sinhalese and Tamil.
The job was not onerous, and he devoted his time to 'verandahism', a term he invented to describe hours passed on his private verandah, drinking, smoking, taking benzedrine and having sex with the locals.
Published as a novel, it is in fact three interrelated novellas each illustrating what Frank Tuohy identified as Green’s principal theme: ‘the relationship of an older man with a younger, of a different class or race’.
Green spent the rest of his life working on a related volume of short stories 'on the theme of the failure of Love' and set in Ceylon and Morocco, where he went on holiday in 1975.