Scavenging and looting

Ron Piper was a young lad during WW2, and a naughty one at that. This extract taken from his memoir 'Take him away' recount some of the thieving he got up to in the bombed out buildings and houses of London. Was he too young to know any better? You decide.

So there was a war going on, but to me as a seven year old boy it didn't matter. People dying, being wounded, bombs falling all over London, blasting homes to the ground, it was no great fuss. What it had done for me was to fetch an excitement to my life, the bombed houses becoming danger­ous playgrounds to be searched for anything that could be taken home as legitimate booty. All sorts of things were found by the gang of kids I hung around with (mainly boys, with a few girls now and again). There was money and the odd bit of jewellery which we gave to our mothers (the jewellery that is, the money we kept quiet about) but the most impor­tant find of all was shrapnel. Shrapnel was something that could he bartered with; the bigger the piece, the more that was offered by other kids who had not been so lucky in their search. A whole week's sweet ration could be asked for and got. So the hunt was on each day.

During these hunts things could become a bit macabre, especially after a night-time air raid; a night spent by whole families in the crypt of the local church, used as an air raid shelter. Emerging from the church to go back home after the all-clear had sounded, eyes were everywhere,  looking for fires still burning, seeking out houses that had taken direct hits. Because as the day progressed, us kids knew we would be searching these bomb-damaged buildings for whatever could be found, to take home as our booty for the day.

People were always looking around for things for their homes, especially if their first homes had been damaged in an air raid or ruined altogether. They wanted furniture, pots, pans, any-thing to build a new home with. What I couldn't make out was that with all the bombed houses  there were around, with some perfectly good furniture in parts of them, and no one living there, why they just didn't go along and pick it up and cart it off back home. A couple of people who were moaning about wanting this and that, I told where they could pick up the stuff that they wanted. But I was told by them that they couldn't do that as it was looting.
Ron Piper - Take him away