Southerners know that it’s classy to be dirty

The upper-middles have a proud tradition of not bothering much about a clean and tidy home

Who would want Kirstie Allsopp, homemaker to the nation, running a censorious finger over their pelmets? Nobody south of Watford, it seems. She sparked some aggrieved, possibly guilty, Twitterstorming by observing: “In 15 years of going round the country house-hunting, I have observed that the further north you go from London the cleaner the homes are.”

Ouch! That touched a nerve. I married a Yorkshireman, of the class whose identity is proudly bound up with practices like holystoning the front step and forcibly preventing the man of the house from venturing beyond the kitchen door in his mucky overalls.

In industrial towns and small cramped houses, women long fought a heroic, gritty battle to keep the muck on the outside. Because it was such visible muck, from the mines and the mill chimneys, they had to fight it daily. Let one speck settle and you saw it and winced. With a few exceptions (like the smoggier or dockier bits) southern filth has always tended to be subtler and easier to ignore.

So – while Allsopp’s line is a mischievously provocative generalisation – some of its truth is geographical.

Northern cleanliness by tradition is a response to the concentration of proper, visible grime: a slagheap at your back door, belching lorries down the street, the smoke of the steelworks. So you scrub and dust, boil your doilies and antimacassars and keep the parlour sacrosanct and give rooms “a good bottoming”. Even when the big polluters are long gone and the machines fallen silent, old habits and instincts linger on.

But the other factor, which would have stirred up even more outrage if she had dared to express it, is class. The English upper-middles have a proud tradition of not bothering much, and regarding fastidious domestic cleanliness as either plebeian or nouveau riche.

The reek of old wellies, the matted dog-hair on the furniture, the Olympically intertwined rings left by glasses and mugs on polished tables, a pony’s sweaty head collar chucked on the kitchen worktop and drifts of empty (but good) wine bottles in the hall spell comfort, security, insouciance.

One chap from a large bohemian southern family found it hard to adapt to his Derbyshire partner’s reasonable preoccupation with coasters: “In the house where I grew up there was no piece of furniture on which you could not put down a mug of tea and a bacon sandwich. That included the sofa.”

Yesterday’s ham bone, last year’s pine needles and last week’s bra are marks of a gentility so self-confident that it does not need to scrub. My mother proudly rejected the net-curtain respectability of her Nottinghamshire upbringing and would get furious when a kindly visitor took a feather duster to her cobwebs – “So common! You never see a fly here, those spiders are my friends.” Think of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire

Chronicles – of double-barrelled southern mucksters in sprawling, dusty country houses, where wet boots are chucked into the inglenook to dry and Labradors drink from the lavatory. When Rupert Campbell-Black marries a fastidious American and she puts blue disinfectant in what she calls the “john” he roars, “Are you trying to poison my dogs?”

Or take John Bayley’s description of his ménage with Iris Murdoch, and the time when to their chagrin they were unable, for years, to locate beneath the piles of dusty books, papers and discarded cardigans a particularly fine pork pie they had brought home. My Northern husband says that every one of the women down his childhood terrace would dismiss these towering literary intellectuals as no more than “a pair of mucky buggers”.

The less you have – or have grown up with – the more fiercely you guard it. My late mother-in-law had some replastering done and was constitutionally unable to accept that it needed to dry out for a good few days before decorating. “I’ve not been used to poverty!” she would grumble: that faint patch in the corner of the wall meant damp, dirtiness, the thin end of the wedge.

In the same way, if you want to see children in sparklingly white socks, head to the poorest streets and cheapest holiday resorts. Or indeed to Africa, where they walk dusty tracks to school looking far tidier than the shambling hordes outside some Sussex prep.

Allsopp isn’t speaking scientifically. There are speckless houseproud people in Kent and muck-tubs in the North. But given the inequality of wealth across the nation, that class element probably makes her observation at least a bit credible. So, to be more sombre, does inequality in health. The South-East still has longer average lifespans than the North: remembered (and actual) poverty makes people less likely to chirp “eat a peck of dirt before you die!”, flick the green bits off that mouldering cheese – and merrily ignore the cat’s footprint in the butter.