And there are elements to those books that put me in mind of the most interesting British wartime propaganda films. I even wonder if one thing Saville sought to do in writing the first book, Mystery at Witchend, was to warn children that they should be alert to the existence of fifth columnists and Nazi spies
If the point of Went the Day Well? was to remind its audience that everywhere, even a village as remote and insignificant as Bramley End, was in danger from Nazi infiltrators, then Mystery at Witchend said the same thing about the even remoter countryside of the Shropshire hills.
So Dickie has to accept that even the dashing RAF pilot he and Mary helped find his way on the Long Mynd was a Nazi - "one of the worst".
And Mary makes an observation that could come from Went the Day Well?:
"And there was something else, Dickie. Did you notice what I noticed? Did you hear."
He looked puzzled for a moment.
"Wasn't anything to hear, was there?"
Then they stared at each other without speaking, and Dickie's second shoe dropped to the floor.
"Of course," he went on. "Of course there was something to hear. They were all talking all the time."
"Course they were," said Mary slowly. "But they weren't speaking English."
If Mystery at Witchend is about the risk of a German invasion, then Seven White Gates is about Anglo-American relations. You will find this theme in A Canterbury Tale and, above all, in A Matter of Life and Death.
When David Niven appears before a Heavenly court to plead to be allowed to stay on earth with his new American love, counsel for the prosecution is Abraham Farlan, who hates the British for making him the first casualty of the American Revolutionary War.
Niven wins his case, and his and Hunter's love becomes a metaphor for relations between the two nations.
In Seven White Gates the metaphorical relationship is that of an estranged father and son. When Peter goes to stay at White Gates farm under the Stiperstones, she finds it presided over by the daunting figure of Uncle Micah, who speaks like someone out of the Old Testament and soothes his broken heart with midnight rambles to the Devil's Chair.
He is followed on one of these by the twins, who become trapped in old mine workings. They are rescued by some American soldiers on a training exercise, and their officer proves surprisingly knowledgeable about the area and inquisitive about the farm.
Mary realises he must be Uncle Micah's son Charles, who left for America after a terrible row with his father. And she duly brings them together at the end of the book.
I don't think you can carry on with the filmic comparisons after Seven White Gates. The Lone Pine stories becoming more formulaic and concern themselves with finding buried treasure or rounding up criminals.
But the first two of those stories display themes that you will also find in British films of the period.
8 comments:
Uncle Micah sounds just like Amos Starkadder in Cold Comfort Farm. Still the best skewering of country-based novels in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Uncle Micah owes a lot to Mary Webb, who was one of the writers Stella Gibbons had in mind. Malcolm's brother Kenneth Saville was a novelist, and I suspect his work was of that school too.
I remember reading the early Savilles as a child, and when I recently read a Mary Webb, I didn’t make the connection. https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/seven-for-a-secret-by-mary-webb
I saw the connection as more one of reassurance to Saville's original audience, children with father's on active service overseas, that parent and child WILL come back together. The theme's amplified by Peter's father returning from his temporary absence in Birmingham, plus Mr Morton coming home on leave to see his three for what's implied to be the first time in at least a year.
That sounds very Saville, but a fair number of his readers will have lost their fathers in the war or family members to bombing by 1943. In the third book, Jon has lost is father (and Penny a loved uncle), while Tom's whole family is wiped out after Seven White Gates (presumably so he continues to live in Shropshire), though we don't hear much about it until later. In fact, the Mortons are unique in the series in being the only happy two-parent family.
You might want to check my blog: I did a lengthy post about parents, specifically mothers, in not just the Lone Pine Club books but across all his fiction for older readers: a pretty grisly scenario.
I read that the other day! I also share your affection for the Jillies. Mind you, I like the twins too. You can tell he had fun writing their dialogue in the early books. A critic in Saville's day said he never made the Buckinghams quite as appealing as he told us they were, and I think there's something in that.
I only read the Buckinghams in the last six years or so and I did enjoy them, the first three the most. It's the publishing schedule which puzzles me - three in five years then gaps of nine and eight years. Sadly, I think the Marston Baines series, of which Saville had such high hopes, was mostly awful.
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