The Duchess of Sussex has just the right attitude to cleaning

Eighteen months ago, a newspaper reported that pupils at Furzedown Primary school in Wandsworth, south London, were being asked to vacuum their classrooms at the end of the school day. It was, the newspaper explained, “a stark example of how the government’s funding cuts are hitting schools across the country”.

Fast-forward to the new academic year at the Grove Primary School, Totnes, where a different set of primary school children have been asked to vacuum their classroom. Another stark example of funding cuts? Apparently not. Cleaning, the head teacher, Hilary Priest, explained, “is a good way for the children to respect their school and their environment”. Noah, a six-year-old pupil, agreed. Cleaning, he said, was a way of “protecting our school”.

The idea for Ms Priest’s initiative came from Japan, where pupils from the age of six are expected to clean their classrooms as part of the educational curriculum. The switch of perspective is intriguing. The Wandsworth account embodies the view of cleaning as drudgery: low-status work performed by people without a stake in the structures to which they are tending. The Japan/ Totnes approach encourages pupils to see their classroom as a common possession, a place they care for and – as Noah put it – “protect”.

It was a Japanese author, Marie Kondo, who made us love the idea of decluttering, with her bestselling book, The Life-changing Magic of Tidying. But the humble task of maintaining our surroundings is not entirely an exotic Oriental concept. Last week the Duchess of Sussex introduced what may be a novel idea in royal circles, when she told the pupils of an Australian girls’ school that “taking out the trash” had given her a “good work ethic”. And as long ago as 1633, the priest/poet George Herbert observed, in his poem “The Elixir” that sweeping a room in the right spirit could be “divine”. If only the shade of Mrs Herbert could tell us whether he suited the action to the words.

Twenty years ago, doing a miserable job, I survived by visiting the City of London churches in my lunch hour, when I had time in which to walk and think. So the news that the average workers’ lunch hour has shrunk to 22 minutes is melancholy in all sorts of ways.

The physical effects of prolonged sitting are well documented (migraine, back problems, haemorrhoids – and that’s just the millennials). But the spiritual effects of no time in which to eat, to think, to move about – to be, in short, oneself, rather than a unit of corporate production – are equally damaging. Among the innumerable aspects of European culture that we are poised to reject, the humane and civilised habit of a lunch hour is one worth preserving.

Anthea Bell, who died last week, was the translator of the Asterix series, Hans Christian Andersen, W G Sebald and a host of other fortunate authors. Translators, she once said, should create the illusion that “a reader is reading not a translation but the real thing”. In a family of wordsmiths – her father, Adrian, was a novelist, her brother, Martin, a journalist and MP – Bell’s precise and witty way of introducing unknown work to an anglophone audience was, perhaps, the most valuable of all – a conduit, as the novelist Will Self put it, to our “understanding of, and empathy with, other peoples”. The real thing, indeed.