Three brass pushes on the jamb, three labels behind glass, three sets of wires. The middle one is not connected to anything in this house and it rings something.
We have been here eleven years. It is a double-fronted Edwardian house on a road of them, and it has never been flats, and I can prove that in the way you prove anything about a house, which is with paper.
The deeds go back to 1907 and there is no conversion and no reconversion. The council has it as a single dwelling and always has; I have the council tax banding history because I queried it once about something else. The 1911 census has one household in it. Every census since has one household in it. There is one front door, one kitchen, one meter, one letterbox.
On the door jamb there are three bell pushes.
They are original or near enough. Brass, oval, with a white ceramic button, mounted one above the other on a brass backplate that is screwed into the jamb with four screws that have been painted over so many times they are just dimples.
Between the pushes are two little brass frames with glass in them, the sort that held a card with a name on. They are empty now. There is a rectangle of grey where the card was.
The top push rings the bell in the hall. It is a proper bell, a dome on the wall over the kitchen door, and it works and it is loud and the postman uses it.
The bottom push does nothing. I traced that one properly in 2016 when we had the hall rewired: two wires that run up inside the jamb about eighteen inches and stop, cut clean, and the ends are old and dark. Somebody disconnected it a long time ago and there is nothing sad or strange about that.
The middle one is the reason I am writing.
Press it and there is a bell.
Not in our hall. It is not our dome; I have stood next to the dome and had my wife press the middle push and the dome does not move.
It is further away and it is muffled and it is behind you. That is the only way I can put it. You are stood on the step facing the door and the sound is somewhere behind your right shoulder and below, as if it is in a room you cannot see from where you are.
It is a different bell from ours. Ours is a bright single ding. This one is two notes, a two-tone, the sort of chime a house got in the sixties.
We have no such chime in this house. I have been in every room, the cellar, the loft, and the outhouse.
I have done everything sensible.
I traced the wires. The middle push has two wires that go up inside the jamb, cross the top of the door, and go into the wall on the hinge side, and I opened that wall in 2016 when we had the plasterer in, four feet of it, and the wires go into the brickwork of the party wall and I could not follow them further without taking the wall down.
The party wall is with number 14. I have known them since we moved in. They have a plastic wireless doorbell from Argos and they have had it for years and it plays a tune.
I asked. Of course I asked. I stood on their step in 2017 and I said, this is going to sound mad, and I explained, and the husband thought it was brilliant and made me press it eleven times while he stood in every room of his house, and he heard nothing at all, and neither did I from inside his house, and we both heard it perfectly well from outside on my step.
Here is the thing that means it is not next door and that took me another four years to find.
I pressed it in the snow.
March, a proper fall, six inches, and I was clearing the step and I pressed the middle push with my glove on and I heard it, and I noticed that I could hear how far away it was. Snow does that. It takes the reflections out of everything and you can suddenly hear distance.
It is not next door. It is not eight feet through a wall. It is further than the width of this house, and it is below the level of the step, and it is in a direction where there is nothing but the front garden and then the road.
I have since done it three more times in the right conditions and I am as sure as I can be about anything: the bell that rings when I press that push is about forty feet away and about ten feet down, under the road.
I looked into the road. This is the part where it goes from odd to something I do not talk about at work.
There is a Victorian sewer under it, which is on the water company's map and is where you would expect. There is nothing else on any statutory plan. No cellar, no tunnel, no shelter, no undercroft, nothing.
But this town was bombed in 1941, not badly, one night, and the local studies collection has an ARP map, and there was a public shelter on this road.
It was a surface shelter, a brick and concrete box on the pavement, taken down in 1946.
Underneath the position of that shelter, on the same map, in a different hand, is a small square marked W with a number, which the key at the side says is a warden's post.
A warden's post is a room. Sometimes a cellar under a house that was given over, sometimes a purpose-built one, and it had a telephone and it had a bell, because that is how you called the warden out.
The square is about forty feet from my front door and it is on the other side of the pavement line, under what is now the road.
I am not going to tell you a story about a warden.
What I keep is smaller and worse and it is the reason I have written this down at all.
The pushes are original brass, painted over, from a house that was never divided. Three of them, with two name frames.
Which means that in 1907, when this house was built with one front door and one kitchen and one household, somebody specified three bells, and had them fitted, and labelled two of them.
The war was thirty-four years away.
I have measured the paint on the screws with a pin and there are eleven or twelve coats and the bottom one is a dark green that is on nothing else in the house.
Somebody put a bell push on this house for a room under the road, and then somebody built the room.