You ring the family below you on the list and they ring the family below them. Number eleven is a landline for a cottage that came down in 1998, and it answers, and it passes the message on.
I am on the parent council at a primary school in a village of about four hundred people, and one of the things I look after is the snow chain.
Everybody under fifty asks why we do not just use the app. We do use the app. We also have a group chat, and the school has a text service, and the closure goes on the county website.
We keep the chain because in 2010 we were cut off for four days and the mast went down with the power and the only thing that worked was the landlines, and because the head at the time was seventy-one and had seen it before.
So it survives. Twenty-six households, in an order that is roughly geographical, and each one has the number of the household after it.
The head rings number one. Number one rings number two. And so on, down to twenty-six, who rings the head back to close the loop, and if the loop closes then everybody has been told.
I took the list over in 2019 from a woman who had run it since 2004, and she gave me a laminated card and a folder, and in the folder was every version of the list going back to 1991 because she was that sort of woman, God bless her.
The first thing I did was update it, because half the numbers were mobiles now and three families had moved away.
I went through it against the school roll and the electoral register and I got to number eleven.
Number eleven is a landline number, an 01-something with the old local exchange code, and against it in the folder is written a surname and, in the 1991 list, a house name. Not a number on a street. A house name, which round here means a cottage.
There is no such cottage.
I want to go carefully because I have been through this many times.
The house name is real. It is on the 1975 Ordnance Survey at a spot on the lane out past the church, and it is on the tithe map, and it is in the parish records as a dwelling from the 1840s.
It is not on the current OS. There is a field gate there and a stone gatepost and a level place in the grass, and if you know to look there is a bit of wall in the hedge line.
The parish minutes for March 1998 record that the cottage, which had been derelict for some years and was unsafe, was demolished, and the site made good. Six lines and a note about the cost of removing the rubble.
The number is still on the chain. It has been on every version of the list from 1991 to the one I am holding.
The chain gets tested. That is the part that matters and that is the part that nobody who hears about this ever expects.
We test it every October, before the weather. The head rings number one at seven in the evening with a test message, a word we choose beforehand, and it goes down the chain, and twenty-six rings the head back and gives her the word.
I have run four of those tests. Every one has closed.
The word gets through. Which means number ten rings number eleven, and number eleven rings number twelve, and number twelve hears the word from somebody.
I asked number ten.
Number ten is a farmer in his sixties who has been on that list since before I was born. I asked him, carefully, over a gate, whether he actually rang eleven or whether he skipped down to twelve.
He said, no, I ring the number on the card.
I said, do you know whose it is.
He said, it is whoever is at eleven.
And I said, but do you know them, and he thought about it and he said, well, not to speak to. She just says right you are and puts the phone down. Always has.
And then he said the thing that made me stop asking people, which he said perfectly comfortably, leaning on the gate.
He said, my father had eleven above him and all.
I have rung it. Of course I have. Four times, all in daylight, all sober.
It rings. It is a real ring, the double burr of a landline, not the modern one.
Three times it rang out.
The fourth time, in the January before last, somebody picked up and there was that particular sound of a room with a hard floor and nothing in it, and I said, hello, this is the school chain, this is a test, and a woman's voice said, right you are.
And put the phone down.
I sat in my kitchen for a bit and then I rang number twelve, who is a young couple with two girls, and I asked whether they had had a call.
The wife said yes, about a minute ago, a woman, she gave the word and rang off, and she said it in the tone of somebody describing the most ordinary thing that has ever happened, because it is, because it happens every October.
I had not given the word. I had said it was a test.
The word was the right one. It was the word we had used at the October test three months earlier.
I did the thing you are supposed to do. I rang the phone company, in my capacity, and asked about the line.
The number is not allocated. It is not ex-directory, it is not withheld, it is not a redirect. It is a number that is not in service and has not been since the exchange was digitised, and the woman I spoke to was very patient and offered to run a line test, and the line test says there is no line.
I have not taken it off the list.
I have thought about it for six years and I have written the arguments down and here is where I have got to.
If I take it off, the chain becomes twenty-five households and number ten rings number twelve, and it will work, because it is a list.
But four times a year, and once for real in a bad February when the lane was shut and the mast was down, somebody at eleven has picked up a phone that does not exist and passed a message to a house with two little girls in it, correctly, in the right words, on time.
Whatever that is, it is doing the job. It has been doing it since before my farmer's father was on the list.
And the only version of this where I find out what happens if I take her off is the version where I take her off, and it will be a snow day, and there will be a child walking to a school that is shut.
So she stays on the card, at number eleven, and every October I ring number one at seven o'clock and I wait for twenty-six to ring me back, and it always does.