Mystery at Witchend is Went the Day Well? and Seven White Gates is A Matter of Life and Death

Malcolm Saville wrote his first two Lone Pine books while the second world war was raging. He somehow found time to work on them while holding down a day job in publishing and fire-watching by night. 

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.