Four light-mass nuclei are considered by an effective two-body clusterisation method; 7 Li as 3 H+ 4 He, 7 Be as 3 He+ 4 He, 8 Be as 4 He+ 4 He, and 6 Li as 2 H+ 4 He. The low-energy spectra of the former three are determined from single-channel Lippmann-Schwinger equations. For the latter, two uncoupled sets of equations are considered; those involving the 3 S 1 and those of the posited 1 S 0 states of 2 H. Low-energy elastic scattering cross sections are calculated from the same 2 H+ 4 He Hamiltonian, for many angles and energies for which data are available. While some of these systems may be more fully described by many-body theories, this work establishes that a large amount of data may be explained by these two-body clusterisations.