First world problems: Coping without the cleaner in lockdown
It’s the most middle-class of all pandemic headaches. But Katy McGuinness has found cleaning her own house strangely cathartic
Afew weeks back, I was talking to a friend with a suspected case of Covid in her household.
“I got the bleach out and spent the day cleaning”, she said. “I don’t trust anyone else to do it properly... my mother taught me well.”
I wanted to ask her what that meant, but I couldn’t. I was ashamed to say that I didn’t know how to clean.
My mother was a feminist who regarded the traditional domestic skills of cooking and cleaning with disdain. She cooked grudgingly, was an early adopter of convenience food and advised me from an early age to make sure that whatever career I pursued, it provided me with enough money always to be able to afford a cleaner.
She never taught me to clean, and I never taught myself either (although I did teach myself to cook). I didn’t see the need. I like a clean house as much as the next person, and so I followed my mother’s advice, and always employed a cleaner.
I hope that I have treated the people who have cleaned my house for me well — I have always paid above the going rate, and provided good coffee and snacks, but never gone as far as cleaning before the cleaner’s arrival, as my mother did. She never explained why, but I think it was a combination of not wanting the cleaner to see the worst of how we lived (messy rather than dirty) and wanting to show respect for the woman who came to clean for a stranger’s family in order to feed her own.
Some of the people who have cleaned my house did so for many years, and I got to know them and their families well. But when we moved three years ago it was too far for the woman who had worked for us for over a decade to travel, and since then there has been a succession of casual cleaners, most sourced through an online agency. It has suited them to work for us for a few weeks or months while studying and then to move on when they found a role in their chosen field — not cleaning.
Back in early-March, when the implications of Covid-19 for a household like ours that includes a vulnerable member with a disability became very clear, very quickly, and our short-term cleaner quit, I did not have to deal with the quandary of whether to keep paying someone who had been with us for a long time. (A friend who has had the same cleaner for a long time and whose own job and income are secure has continued to pay her cleaner, which is the decent thing to do.)
I don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for me, but neither can I say that the prospect of cleaning my own house filled me with joy. I know that I am lucky to have a house of my own and to share it with people who get the principle that household tasks are to be shared. But they also have to be distributed according to time available and ability to perform, which effectively meant that until my son finished his finals last week and could join in, it was down to me and my husband. We agreed at the outset that paying work always trumps housework, which can wait until the paying work is done.
There are those who think it is morally wrong to employ someone to clean one’s house, but I don’t subscribe to this view. Being a cleaner is nobody’s — other than perhaps Mrs Hinch’s — dream job, but neither is it the very worst, and it can suit as an expedient and flexible way to earn money so long as the hourly rate and conditions are fair.
When I had a cleaner coming to my home, I was not the most demanding of taskmasters. Perhaps that was middle-class guilt? I knew that the work that I wanted done was hard, boring, and lacking in reward. I neither left a list, nor corrected the way the cleaner performed a task — I felt that if I wanted things done in a particular way then I should do them myself. I bought the products that I wanted used because I liked their eco credentials, and the smell of lavender and beeswax, but wasn’t tough enough to insist and obediently picked up the tough, grimebusting chemicals requested. (I only put my foot down once about the use of Pledge on a lovely old antique chest.)
I was a great one for buying gadgets and presenting them to my cleaner as if I was giving her a gift. I cringe at the memory of the Good Grips mop that I saw India Knight tweet about (“life-changing” she trilled) and immediately ordered off Amazon (more shame), bestowing it upon my poor cleaner as if she should be grateful.
I bought a retro feather duster with a beautiful wooden handle because I loved the look of its ostrich plumes (and never threw it out even though one detached every time anyone picked it up), and a yoke with a long extendable handle for getting dust and cobwebs off the cornicing that I saw on a television programme about the cleaning regimen in National Trust stately homes. I even bought a wooden-handled bristle brush for cleaning behind the radiators and hung it by its tape loop on a hook in the utility room, while I hid the neon nylon (and perhaps more effective) version on top of a cupboard.
I’m ashamed to say that I often saw only what
my cleaner had missed, rather than what he had done. But for the past eight weeks we’ve been doing it ourselves. We are working our way through the chemicals and replacing them as they run out with more natural products that we like better. I’m starting to understand which work best where and for what, and why there is an order in which the various tasks should be carried out. I keep old newspapers because it’s true that they get the smears off the mirrors better than anything. And, while I will probably never get to the point of making my own cleaning products, it is something that I have considered, albeit briefly.
Our best investment has been a hand-held vacuum cleaner for €70, and I can’t believe I never had one before. That truly is lifechanging.
I am getting to know my house better. I often write at the kitchen table and for months, a particularly grimy, awkward corner that’s in my direct eyeline has been bothering me, but the cleaner had never noticed it and I had done nothing about it either. Perhaps I didn’t think it was my job. Last Saturday I spent the afternoon in the kitchen washing and wiping, vacuuming and mopping. I lay on the floor to clean the skirting boards — the amount of dog hair from two supposed non-shedders was incredible — and even used that thing for cleaning behind the radiators. At the end of it, there was satisfaction in looking at that gleaming corner. Next weekend, perhaps I’ll pull out the Magic Eraser and have a go at the scuff marks under the bathroom cabinet that you only see from the loo.
This is by no means a paean to the joys of cleaning, and I loathe the fetishisation — exclusively aimed at women — of something that really is just a basic life-skill that everyone should have, same as being able to cook a nutritious meal and brush one’s teeth. I hold to my view that there is always something more interesting to do than clean, but I am not hating it as much as I thought that I would. When it is safe to do so, I’ll have a cleaner again but, in the meantime, I’ll take quiet pride in getting better at keeping an ordered house.