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- Herausgeber: Canbury
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
'A jaw-dropping investigation' – THE BOOKSELLER 'Succeeds brilliantly in dismantling casual assumptions about the drudgery of cleaning' – THE GUARDIAN 'A great book, well researched, funny and poignant. I loved it.' – KIT DE WAAL Dishing the Dirt tells the jaw-dropping stories of London's house cleaners for the very first time. We hear from immigrants who clean suburban family homes to butlers who manage the homes of the super wealthy, and from joyful cleaners and entrepreneurs to escaped victims of human trafficking. Then there are women who dust nude and male cleaners who have to fight off wandering hands. And the crime scene cleaners. With the revelation of Maid by Stephanie Land and the cleaning tips of Mrs Hinch's Hinch Yourself Happy, Dishing the Dirt will turn all of your assumptions about cleaners upside down. About the Author Nick Duerden is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph, the i paper, and GQ. His books include Exit Stage Left, Get Well Soon: Adventures in Alternative Healthcare, A Life Less Lonely, and The Smallest Things. He lives in London with his wife and two daughters. Extract Prologue. Clocking On It was as if she were invisible, like she wasn't even there. Or, perhaps more accurately, like she didn't really count, not in any tangible sense, this mostly silent domestic cleaner with the broken English whose back was perpetually stooped over the vacuum cleaner, the dustpan and brush, the damp mop; someone who likely knew her way around the utility room better than the homeowners themselves. Today, the wife was away on business, as she frequently was, but the husband wasn't here alone. The marital bed was not empty. 'A different woman,' she says. 'Younger.' And he didn't hide this from you, wasn't embarrassed, ashamed of parading his affair so brazenly under your nose? She shakes her head, and smiles tightly. 'No,' she says. 'No.' She was seemingly in his confidence, then, but not through any prior agreement, a finger to the side of the nose, and nor was he paying her for her silence, her implicit complicity. 'I don't think he even considered me,' she says. 'Or my reaction.' She was merely part of the furniture, a once-weekly presence in the house who mutely got on with her work as she always did, over three floors, three bedrooms and two bathrooms: the vacuuming, the polishing, the dusting... ... In the 1980s, both husbands and wives were now required to go out to work, to pursue careers. This left little time for domestic upkeep... There was no shortage of willing char ladies. In the 21st Century, we are willing to delegate more, specifically to pay others to do the work we'd rather not do ourselves, even if we cannot really afford it. A wave of cheap immigrant labour entered the UK between 2000 and 2020, especially from the new EU member states in eastern Europe. Better to pay a Magda from Poland, say, £30 a week to run the Hoover around the house for a few hours than to save the money for a rainy day. ... Those that clean for Londoners are a silent army. They bring order to our lives, they put out the bins, and relieve us of at least some of the myriad pressures of modern life. They are privy to our indiscretions, our peculiarities, our curious habits. They put up with us, which isn't always easy because some of us are complicated souls.
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DISHING THE DIRT
Nick Duerden
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Demand for domestic cleaners has never been higher. If we don’t employ one ourselves, we probably know someone who does. Comparatively few people, however, know much about the workers themselves.
In the autumn of 2018, I set out to find out more about the individuals who play such an intimate role in our homes. Over 15 months, I interviewed dozens of cleaners from all over the world who have settled, and now work, in London, and I asked them about their lives. At first many were understandably nervous and mistrustful, and reluctant to talk; others spoke as if they had been waiting for years to be heard.
Each chapter of this book offers a glimpse into a previously hidden world, a selection of snapshots that reveal what it’s really like to clean up after others in a country that’s often far from home, where cultural disparities loom large, and where homeowners can have peculiarly exacting standards.
For reasons that will become obvious, some names have been changed.6
Contents
8
Advert on Gumtree for domestic cleaning services
Hello
This is Taki and Simone at jobs done plus the guys from the WhatsApp Cleaning group
Im Not A Agency Or work for a Company
Taki & Simone are cousins which are cleaner that got too many jobs and now have set up a WhatsApp group with other cleaner and we share and swap jobs
I have trained all the cleaners my self personally as I have very high standards not just in the service of work but in Customer service
Are you still looking for a amazing cleaner;)
This is what Is willing to be Done as long as time permits How many hours do you need?
If there is a Pacific room or area you want concentrating on please let me know
– Floor will be hover and moped
– cooker Top will be cleaned
– Any dishes done and put away9
BATHROOMS/SHOWERS/TOILETS Cleaning
– Windows will be clean (indoor only)
– All floors clean/carpet/mopped
– Bed made all new sets changed and made
– Any built in cupboards are cleaned externally
I’m organised and reliable I sometime do these services With other cleaners at the price which will allow me finish the job quicker because we are working as a team
Prologue. Clocking On
It was as if she were invisible, like she wasn’t even there. Or, perhaps more accurately, like she didn’t really count, not in any tangible sense, this mostly silent domestic cleaner with the broken English whose back was perpetually stooped over the vacuum cleaner, the dustpan and brush, the damp mop; someone who likely knew her way around the utility room better than the homeowners themselves.
Today, the wife was away on business, as she frequently was, but the husband wasn’t here alone. The marital bed was not empty.
‘A different woman,’ she says. ‘Younger.’
And he didn’t hide this from you, wasn’t embarrassed, ashamed of parading his affair so brazenly under your nose?
She shakes her head, and smiles tightly. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No.’
She was seemingly in his confidence, then, but not through any prior agreement, a finger to the side of the nose, and nor was he paying her for her silence, her implicit complicity. ‘I don’t 12 think he even considered me,’ she says. ‘Or my reaction.’ She was merely part of the furniture, a once-weekly presence in the house who mutely got on with her work as she always did, over three floors, three bedrooms and two bathrooms: the vacuuming, the polishing, the dusting.
She had a name, Boglárka, and she was Hungarian, mid-thirties, here in London a couple of years now, almost fluent but shy with it. She had a bank account, a bike, an Oyster card; she flat-shared in one of the outer boroughs, and diligently sent money back home each month via PayPal. The wife knew her name, though would, like everyone else here, struggle with its hard consonants, but the husband offered no suggestion that he did. ‘Hello’ and ‘goodbye’ had been the full extent of their communications since her work here had begun a full year previously.
Right now, she picked up the clothes that had been discarded, pre-coitally the night before, on the bedroom carpet, disposed of the used prophylactic, and focused on the post-coital bed once she—the other woman—had at last got up to join the husband downstairs in the kitchen. More traces of the previous night’s indiscretion were then dutifully wiped clean, the bed stripped, the sheets bundled into the washing machine, which she set to 60° before pressing START. She cleaned the en-suite, the shower stall, and scrubbed the toilet bowl, which bore evidence of repeated use and little care and attention on the days she didn’t come to clean. She hung his crumpled suit jacket back in the wardrobe, and 13liberated the clothes dryer of its smalls, his and his absent wife’s, replacing them gently, respectfully even, in their appropriate drawers, his and hers, on either side of the matrimonial bed. The photograph of the both of them on their wedding day, confetti in their hair, sat in its usual position on the chest of drawers. She dusted it now, as she always did.
Working from the top of the house to the bottom, opening windows under the eaves in the attic and disturbing the dust, which took to the air and danced in a column of sunlight, she used Cif and Harpic, Domestos and Windolene, her rubber gloves slick with chemicals, her fingers inside clammy with sweat. Often, she was down on her hands and knees, because he liked the carpet beneath the bed swept, the floorboards underneath the sofa, too. Here, she found balls of fluff, probably the cat’s, and curling sweet wrappers; she found odd socks, a random shoe whose low-heeled counterpart, she presumed, was secreted elsewhere in the house but not yet stumbled across. A bra: the wife’s, or the other woman’s?
If the bathroom had been reliably messy, the kitchen was worse. The kitchen was always worse. Woks and frying pans meant grease splattered north east south and west, the cupboards alongside the hob, the dust-encrusted extractor fan above. Mr Muscle Kitchen Cleaner, and lots of it. Plates were piled high in the sink, mugs with days-old tidemarks. A scouring pad somewhere beneath.14
Next to the microwave, the coffee that he had made for her, that he made for her every Wednesday morning at 8 o’clock, was cooling, first ignored, then ultimately forgotten, coffee that she would, after he had departed for work, pour slowly down the sink in favour of the tall glass of water she needed to slake her mounting thirst.
She steered clear of the kitchen for now, taking her time in the living room, with its bookshelves, mantelpiece trinkets, the multiple picture frames, the Venetian blinds. She loitered here longer because they were still at the kitchen table, sharing a leisurely breakfast, her legs draped proprietorially over his. He had made her something complicated with eggs (his usual breakfast was a banana and slice of toast), and both of them would be late for work. From where she was in the lounge, deliberately not eavesdropping but overhearing everything anyway, she could make out kisses, lovers’ giggles. She coughed loudly, deliberately. The ruse worked. The man looked over at the wall clock, noting the time. Shoes on, jackets, briefcase and handbag. Car keys. The front door opened, then slammed shut. Gone, leaving nothing but trails of aftershave and perfume in their wake.
She would likely never see this woman again, and next Wednesday the wife would be back in place, this woman to whom Boglárka would have to smile in greeting while maintaining an awkward silence, siding with the husband when, had she been given the choice, the option, she’d much rather have sympathised 15with the wife. But this was a line she was unable to cross, the ghost in the house who saw no evil, nor spoke it. Her presence in this soap opera might have been front row, but it was not her place to applaud or jeer.
But then, as she had long ago learned, this was an unwritten part of her job description. A domestic cleaner sees many things on any given day during the cleaning of houses; she—and more often than not it is a woman—tells no one. Or almost no one. She tells her fellow cleaners. Cleaners have much gossip to share, and plenty of war stories. And so while she sees everything, and sometimes bears the brunt of her employers’ casual cruelties, she keeps shtum. She simply gets on with the task at hand, because there is always more work to do. Dirt has a habit of reproducing. Always more dirt, always more to clean.
Boglárka has also learned that while she would prefer to have a full grasp of English, some employers would like her tongue to remain semi-skilled. When one is not fluent in the language of the host country, her flatmates have explained, a barrier remains between employer and employee—a notable distance. The hierarchy is observed. Non-linguists can feel inhibited in such situations, so perhaps this is one reason why so many are employed in London today. Homeowners like the conviction that they are above, and cleaners below. The less likely cleaners are to answer back, the more the social order is maintained. In this way, our domestic help will keep themselves to themselves, and focus 16solely, and silently, on the task at hand. In this way, each can ignore the other’s existence more easily, if not entirely, the physical presence of either party receding into a fuzzy background.
But our cleaners do take notice. Naturally and reflexively, they are cultural anthropologists. They hold the key to our real identities, to the people we really are, behind closed doors.
***
Domestic help, now so common, such a factor of everyday life, was once a comparative rarity in the UK, the preserve of the upper classes, those who lived upstairs and employed those who dwelt downstairs. By the early 1900s, the middle classes had begun to enjoy the benefits of cleaners, too, not merely because they also craved tidy homes that they did not have to toil over, but because employing domestic staff had become an indicator of status. The average cleaning lady was a cleaning girl, still a teenager and likely uneducated, and therefore eminently affordable; the pay was low—1p an hour was not untypical—and they often worked 16-hour days. Food and board was included, but the food the servant ate was far inferior to the food they cooked and served their employers, and they often slept in basements, or up in draughty attics, occasionally in the kitchen itself. They were extended few courtesies, and expected to never step out of line. Punishment could be harsh if they did. They had no rights, no public voice. 17They were second-class citizens working as slave labour, but without them residences would fall into abject disarray. Underappreciated as they were, their presence in so many of the nation’s households was essential.
After World War Two, and the introduction of the welfare state in 1948, money was scarce and demand for cleaners evaporated. Throughout the 1950s and beyond, they became, once again, largely the preserve of the wealthy.
But the 1980s saw another shift. Increasingly, both husbands and wives were now required to go out to work, to pursue careers. This left little time for domestic upkeep, and if wives—traditionally the housekeepers—were too tired to vacuum after a long day at the office, their husbands were unlikely to step into the breach. Two salaries brought financial security, and so once again we looked to others to clean up after us. The gig economy duly materialised, and previously out-of-work women began to advertise themselves as cleaners. They brought their friends with them, their mothers and daughters. There was no shortage of willing char ladies. They advertised in the windows of local newsagents, and relied upon word-of-mouth. Business grew.
A generation on, cleaners began utilising the internet. Now anyone can find one at the click of a mouse, and many of us have done just that. Type ‘cleaners London’ into a search engine, and over 39 million results come up.18
The 21st Century has seen further change to how we manage our daily lives. Increasingly, we are willing to delegate more, specifically to pay others to do the work we’d rather not do ourselves, even if we cannot really afford it. A wave of cheap immigrant labour entered the UK between 2000 and 2020, especially from the new EU member states in eastern Europe. Better to pay a Magda from Poland, say, £30 a week to run the Hoover around the house for a few hours than to save the money for a rainy day. This of course plays into Magda’s fortunes directly, and what the profession has lost in status, it has gained in popularity. Careers can be made in cleaning now, and entrepreneurial types have rushed to set up their own businesses in what has become a booming market. Magda, meanwhile, has WhatsApped her friends back home telling of the ready work available here, and her friends, none of them workshy, have come in their droves.
One in four households today with an annual income of under £20,000 still finds the money to pay for a cleaner. Nationwide, the industry is worth some £26 billion a year. Research commissioned by the insurance company esure suggests that the under 35s are most likely to have a cleaner on a weekly basis, millennials intent on getting the most out of their downtime in a way that, by comparison, their parents never did, and never could. If there used to be a certain stigma, a lingering sense of class guilt, about employing another human being to tidy up after you when you could tidy up yourself, there isn’t any more. The younger generation has 19grown up learning that cleaning is something one simply doesn’t do for oneself. Others can do that kind of thing for you.
We might still feel secretly awkward about this. In the words of the writer and poet Kate Clanchy, who wrote a book, Antigona and Me, in 2009 about the improbable relationship she had with her own cleaner, a refugee from Kosovo:
‘It’s about class, and oppression. Even if you think of yourself as this nice, liberal person, you are still representative of the leading class, especially to those you employ. The truth is, every white person in this country is sustained by three or four brown people, and that can be embarrassing to us for all sorts of reasons.’
If it is increasingly true that more and more of our cleaners are coming from overseas—and this is nowhere more true than in London, immigrants invariably fated to do the jobs shunned by natives—then there is another, more revealing, reason why. Those who come from Poland, from Bulgaria and Romania, from the Philippines and Indonesia, tend often to be university educated. Back home, they were white-collar professionals. They had status. But they were forced to leave their countries because they could no longer afford to live, or provide for their families, on the wages they earned, even in decent jobs. Inflation was crippling. In Bulgaria, for example, electricity bills rose month on month—up to 40 per cent during the years 2017/18—which sent even fairly well-paid 20careerists plunging towards the breadline. So they left their breaking, and broken, countries, and travelled abroad in pursuit of that most covet-able of things: a living wage. They came to the UK, and they came to London, where the capital is full of domiciles that need cleaning, and owners impatient to employ someone to oversee the whole messy business. Many such homeowners found themselves more comfortable taking on someone from Romania than from Romford.
‘If you employ a British person to clean your house, they are likely to be working class,’ says one former cleaner-turned-businesswoman from Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia. ‘Many have studied, just like you have, to get a British education, but unlike you, they still end up a cleaner, and this is for them a low status job. So they might resent you. And you, the employer, might see this resentment, and feel it. It’s a class issue, I think. It makes people uncomfortable. But if you employ someone from overseas, someone like me, then you have an educated person cleaning your house, middle-class just like you. So they are the same as you, you might say. With an English cleaner, perhaps not so much. That’s the difference. And it’s a big difference.’
A recent survey undertaken by Bark, a hiring website, revealed that the areas of the UK that saw the highest employment of domestic cleaners included places like Oxford, Cambridge, Reading and York; London was ranked number one. The cities that employed the fewest, and so were deemed the ‘dirtiest,’ were Aberdeen, Manchester, Norwich and Leeds.21
The ‘cleanest’ boroughs in London were Kensington, Westminster, Richmond, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Camden. Without their cleaners, householders would be living in filth. Or else many of us would, like our parents before us, have to spend several evenings and most of Saturday tidying up after ourselves, always the most onerous task of the working week, and the most mundane. The idea of divorce can take root in such monotony.
Those that clean for Londoners are a silent army. They bring order to our lives, they put out the bins, and relieve us of at least some of the myriad pressures of modern life. They are privy to our indiscretions, our peculiarities, our curious habits. They put up with us, which isn’t always easy because some of us are complicated souls.
But who are the members of these well-drilled regiments? What are their stories? Do they know that we talk about them when we are among ourselves—at dinner parties, at coffee mornings, at the school gates—and how much do we care that they, too, talk about us? If we are the prism through which they view their host nation, what conclusions do they draw? Do we make for decent employers, fair and kind, perhaps even generous? And if we are sometimes cruel, and talk down at them, why do we do that? Do we treat them fairly—or are they being taken advantage of?
If we asked them, what would they say?22
1. The Entrepreneur
You would not believe,’ she says, holding my gaze and raising her plucked eyebrow into a Roger Moore arch. ‘Seriously, you have no idea.’
Yuliya is Bulgarian, a former cleaner turned businesswoman. She is telling me about her first few months in this country. ‘A big education,’ she says. She arrived in 2007, aged 29, with her husband, leaving their three-month-old daughter at home with her mother-in-law. She didn’t want to leave, but felt forced to do so. ‘But I was lucky.’ While she had never been to Britain before, she had friends who had settled in Surbiton, a comfortable slice of suburban London, who offered her and her husband the sofa. Surbiton prides itself on politeness and self-conscious levels of decency that newcomers like Yuliya quickly felt and immediately appreciated. She could speak English, but only just, and while she felt welcome, seeking what she calls ‘a proper job’ was out of the question. ‘I couldn’t turn up to interviews speaking such bad English,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t.’24
She became a cleaner.
Back in her hometown of Plovdiv, Yuliya had been a sales executive in an insurance company. Previously, she had studied finance and banking at one of Bulgaria’s best academies. As a twentysomething, she was doing well. ‘But I couldn’t afford to live.’ She shrugs. ‘The utility bills.’
By Bulgarian standards, she had been on pretty decent money. ‘Let’s say you work for £1,000 a month, which is a very good wage there, but your electricity bill is £250–300 a month, and then you have to pay rent, and you have to buy food. And so every month, you have nothing left. It’s difficult. And then it becomes impossible.’
Like many of her compatriots, she felt she had to move abroad for work. She had resisted doing so, until she became a parent. ‘I had to do it for my little girl,’ she says. Leaving her daughter behind, albeit until she and her husband were settled, was the hardest thing she had ever done. ‘I passed my first few months here cleaning and crying, cleaning and crying.’
When I ask if she had cleaned houses before, back home in Bulgaria, she smiles at my wilful naivete.
‘No one,’ she says flatly, almost sternly, ‘who comes here like I did has cleaned before. We’ve come from proper jobs, good jobs. But if you don’t speak fluently here, then it’s impossible to look for similar jobs, even with a good education. So it’s better to do something and earn enough, than try to look smart but remain unemployed and not be able to pay your bills. Most of the people 25who come here to do cleaning have never even considered cleaning before, as all of them are well educated. I know cleaners in the UK who were teachers back at home, chemists; they worked in banks. Most of them are very well educated.’
The period of readjustment was complicated. Yuliya tells me that when you do menial work for people whose education might not be as good as yours, and they then criticise your work, it’s almost impossible not to feel a little resentment. ‘You just feel: Well, come on, I’m not stupid, I’m not doing this because I want to, because I haven’t studied, because I’m not clever enough. I’m in this position because I was born in a country that couldn’t provide for me, and I don’t have a choice. So please, treat me with some respect at least.’
She says:
‘Cleaning is a low status job, of course it is, and everyone goes through that pain in the beginning. You feel bad about yourself because—look! You are cleaning toilets! It’s like: “why have I studied for so many years only to end up doing this?” And you know that back at home, your mother is crying because of how you have ended up. But if you have seen near-poverty in your country, as I have, you quickly come to accept it. This is your reality. You just feel: “I need to cover my bills, I need to be able to make money so that I can send money home.” So you very quickly come to focus on that and stop thinking about your ego, your pride. All you think about, really, is the money. You need to make money.’
26Before long, Yuliya started making money. After landing a few regular cleaning jobs, she printed up flyers, and got to know her neighbourhood more by posting them through letter boxes in and around Surbiton. Soon, she extended her reach to nearby Kingston upon Thames. It might not be factually true to suggest that everybody who walks through the streets of Kingston does so pushing a pushchair, but it might as well be. Yuliya realised that there are many families in Kingston, and many stretched parents who needed help. Before long, Yuliya was inundated with requests and bookings. While her husband was working in construction (‘like all men who come here from Bulgaria’), she became skilled at her new job. Demand for her services grew.
