The Alwyn that Doreen Carwithen met in September 1941 was professionally in the ascendant. Academically respected at the RAM, a prominent name in documentary film music and an experienced composer of ‘serious’ music (and embarked on a new beginning). It was a career still dominated by the documentary, now charged with a more specific task – to bear up the war effort, and to work effectively as propaganda. Inevitably, some of the feature films of the period for which Alwyn wrote scores had appropriate connotations for the time. They Flew Alone had Anna Neagle’s Amy Johnson marrying Robert Newton’s Jim Mollison, an unlikely alliance directed by Herbert Wilcox, for whom Alwyn never worked again. When the film appeared in March 1942 it had a contemporary zing with its events taken up to the previous year. Even more pressed into propaganda service was In Which We Serve, released in October 1942, for which Alwyn (along with Clifton Parker and perhaps other British composers) provided at least arrangements and possibly more, enabling Noel Coward to concentrate more fully on his stagey performance. Nevertheless, Coward was credited with the music (and script and direction, although David Lean was allowed a cocredit). Obviously satisfied with Alwyn’s score for Penn of Pennsylvania, Lance Comfort used him again for Squadron Leader X, released November 1942. Emeric Pressburger’s story of a Nazi, Eric Portman, passing himself off as a British pilot, worked effectively for its period, but there was more distinction in Went the Day Well? released the same month, an Ealing film directed by Alberto Cavalcanti about Nazis pretending to be British soldiers and taking over an idyllic British village inhabited by the usual suspects of British repertory actors (Mervyn Johns, Marie Lohr, Muriel George, Thora Hird); William Walton wrote the music. In 1943 there was another film for Lance Comfort, Escape to Danger, again starring Eric Portman and with Ann Dvorak as an English schoolmistress pretending to be a quisling and rooting out traitors; all prints of it seem to have vanished, and with them Alwyn’s score.