I’m a cleaner – I’ve been running my own business for more than 30 years now – and living in the Home Counties means that some of my customers are millionaires.
Yet while the phrase ‘filthy rich’ might be shorthand for wealth beyond your wildest dreams, for me it’s an all too accurate description. I spend my life trying to bring order to their revolting homes.
From rooms full of dog mess to toilets left unflushed – not to mention lots of other things that would turn your stomach – I’ve seen it all. And I’ve learned that the more money you have, the grubbier, and ruder, you are likely to be. I often say I wipe my shoes on the way out of the fanciest houses I work for, not the way in.
Take some of my (now former) customers: let’s call them Mr and Mrs R. The couple live near one of Britain’s top public girls’ schools, which their daughter attends. Yearly fees are about £40,000.
I did four hours a week and worked for them for four years. But as Mrs R very obviously considered me ‘lower class’ she rarely spoke to me, except to give orders.
Even worse, her house was utterly filthy. Every week, I’d leave it looking like a show home and every week when I arrived, it looked like I had never been there. So, it was back to square one and I never got the chance to get on top of things.
The showers were black with mould that no cleaning product could remove – believe me, I tried.
‘There was the awful occasion when I knocked on the bathroom door of a male customer and he said, «come in» and he was sitting on the loo, just looking at me without a care in the world’
I insisted on washing her dirty dishes in the sink because I refused to even open the dishwasher door – the smell made me gag. I don’t know how she could stand it; but it wasn’t part of my job to clean it, so I kept schtum.
I could also put up with the dirty underwear left on the floor, but what tipped me over the edge was the day she asked me to change the sheets on the marital bed. There were so many stains that I could hardly bear to look at them – I won’t go into more detail as it’s so disgusting. I handed in my notice on the spot.
The reality is that many houses that are jaw-droppingly beautiful from the outside are jaw-dropping for all the wrong reasons inside.
There was one place I nicknamed ‘Mucky Mansions’. It was a small stately home, which was home to two dogs and crammed with ancient, cobweb-draped furniture and threadbare carpets.
The first time I went, my vacuum cleaner rolled over dog poop in the corridor – it was so gloomy due to the old-fashioned lighting, it was impossible to see.
Then, when I tried to clean the kitchen floor there was more of the same. You’d think the owner would have been desperately embarrassed, but not a bit. ‘Don’t worry, girl, just go around it,’ he said in a resigned voice as he proceeded to put newspaper down to cover it up, leaving me to mop around it. After that, I had to mop around a new arrangement of newspaper every week.
I was forbidden from cleaning the bedrooms – probably a good thing, as I once peeked in and it was like a hoarder’s paradise, piled full of junk.
The final straw was the day one of their dogs walked in with a dead chicken in its mouth and their daughter, in her late 20s, started screaming, ‘Daddy, the dog’s had another chicken.’
Then she started a row with her mother about a lettuce and threw it at her head in front of me.
I believe, like my mum used to say, that ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’. My own bedsheets are immaculate and you could eat your dinner off the floor in any room of the house – and I have two dogs.
It’s part of the reason I became a cleaner. As well as wanting to be my own boss and choose my hours, I love cleaning and transforming people’s homes.
It gives me such satisfaction to see a messy house turned into a tidy, shining home with gleaming showers, immaculate kitchen surfaces and fluffed-up cushions. I am never going to become rich, but it pays the bills.
Yet some clients’ filthy attitudes make working for them a misery.
Take Mrs K, for example. She has more designer handbags, shoes, and scarves (often still unopened in their boxes) than Harrods.
But the day I put my prices up – by just £3.50 an hour – for the first time in five years, she tried to haggle. When I refused, she cut my hours from six hours to three claiming she couldn’t afford it. It was no great loss to me, given she regularly failed to understand that I am the cleaner, not a butler or housemaid.
If she had girlfriends round she wanted me to do all the fetching and carrying for them, including serving them tea in fine china.
Meanwhile, Mrs T is a lovely lady who is always polite but her home is a hurricane of designer clothes scattered everywhere.
She and her husband might be able to afford expensive things, but they don’t stay nice for long.
I once got a lecture about the new marble floor in the bathroom and what cleaning products I could and couldn’t use on it. But now it’s ruined anyway because the men of the house – they have two sons – can’t ‘aim straight’ and the acid has ruined the marble.
One teenage son leaves repellent tissues on his bedside table, and far worse, picks his nose and leaves the result smeared on the walls of his room and in the shower.
In other areas, she’s just lazy. Take the pillowcases – she can’t be bothered to wash them, so she just puts new ones on top of the old ones. I counted five on one pillow!
Sometimes, situations are just plain embarrassing. I had one client who would walk around topless without a hint of shame. I once saw her walking around naked in her bedroom with the door wide open when a group of workmen were busy further down the hallway.
And there was the awful occasion when I knocked on the bathroom door of a male customer and he said, ‘come in’ and he was sitting on the loo, just looking at me without a care in the world. I was so embarrassed and apologised. Then I scuttled out as fast as I could. When I saw him later, he acted like it had never happened.
Then there was the personal trainer to rich, bored housewives. I decided to give her bedroom a good clean, but her bedside cabinet had no doors and, as I dusted, a pile of photos fell out.
I picked them up and discovered they were photos of her in – let’s just say – intimate positions.
There was no way I could put them back in the order they fell out, so she would inevitably know I had seen them. Why didn’t she move them before I came?
I wouldn’t have been able to look her in the eye, so I told her that my client list had got too full, and that I needed to cut back. I knew that once she saw the pile of photos she’d understand.
I can’t decide if people are lazy, forgetful, or just ignorant. Your home might be your sanctuary away from the public eye, but it doesn’t render things invisible. If you employ a cleaner, you’d be wise to remember that.
