Baffle walls

The reports of celebrations in your VE Day supplement (8 May) make no mention of the bangs and crashes I associate with it – not from fireworks but from youths pushing over baffle walls.

These were brick structures erected in the early days of the war to protect people sheltering in the tenement closes during air raids from bomb blasts.

The fact that they could be pushed over so easily makes one wonder how effective they would have been. Close mouths were also furnished with blinds to pull down in the event of a gas attack, a horror we were mercifully spared.

I don’t know what became of them. Possibly they did not survive the six years of the war.

S Beck

Craigleith Drive

Edinburgh