The Otterbury Incident

This is by a writer who was both a poet laureate of England and a writer of adult mysteries as Nicholas Blake, but personally I like this story better than any of his "adult" work that I have seen. It is about 2 gangs of boys in post WW2 Britain who are fighting a lively battle of their own with "sticky bombs" to be attached to a "tank" -- however, a window gets broken, and they do various fundraising projects and successfully raise the money to pay for the window -- but then the cash vanishes under circumstances implicating one of the leading boys, so his friends turn detective to find who really took it. The mental toughness and maturity --and loyalty -- of the boys coming out of the rough postwar world is very striking.