A GRIEVING pensioner says she has had to arrange her twin brother’s funeral by letter, because a phone line fault has kept her cut off for a month.

Retired Tower Hill Primary School teacher Irene Tutton, 82, is one of a group of residents of sheltered housing at Square Firs in the West Oxfordshire village of Combe. They have been without phones for four weeks, despite a number of attempts by BT to fix the problem.

The residents first noticed a problem on June 18, when lines went dead on the same day telephone engineers dug a hole in the street to connect a new line to a property.

Four weeks and numerous calls to BT later, they say the problem has not been resolved.

Mrs Tutton’s brother, Harley Berry, died in June and she was distraught when she could not reach relatives in Kent to arrange his funeral service.

She said: “We’re elderly people and we really need our phones. They’ve given us five appointments to fix it and haven’t turned up for one.

“My brother died in the week we got cut off and we had to write letters between our family because we couldn’t phone each other.

“It took us three-and-a-half weeks to arrange the funeral, because we had to do by letter. It was very difficult and very stressful.”

The funeral took place on July 8; the same day BT said it sent out engineers to fix the phone lines problem.

Some residents have mobile phones, but the signal is very poor due to the rural location.

Terry Hubbard, 77, who lives next to Mrs Tutton with wife Carole, said: “Everybody here has been phoning to try to get something done about it. We must have put in eight calls over the past few weeks.

“We’ve had about four vans come round and they take a look at it and say they don’t know what it is, and then off they go.

“They’ve told us it’s because of the bad weather in England, which has disrupted the engineering service.

“I’m annoyed, not just for me but for Irene. She couldn’t even find out when her own brother was getting buried.”

Emma Tennant, a spokeswoman for BT, said the fault was on the Openreach superfast broadband network, which is linked to BT.

She said: “Approximately four customers are without service as a result of a fault in an underground cable.

“It is an involved repair that requires extensive excavation work before the faulty cable can be replaced.

“Every effort is being made to complete the work as quickly as possible. Openreach apologies for any inconvenience caused.”

Mrs Hubbard said: “It’s reprehensible they have left us high and dry for a month. We’re elderly people and totally rely on our phones. I can’t see any excuse for that.”