Today

You'd think that a little house like mine would only need a little bit of cleaning. Not so. Decided to do a Spring-clean. I asked our lovely cleaning lady, Rebecca, if she'd like to do a whole day, took an afternoon off myself and we got stuck in. It's true that nobody cleans your house as well as you do. By the time I got home the fridge and cooker had been cleaned (inside, out and behind) and about half the kitchen cupboards had been done. Rebecca then took on the unenviable task of dusting the fineline blinds in the lounge and Paul did the bookcases. I blitzed the rest of the kitchen, Paul was raving about some new cleaner that's been advertised on TV. "Don't know about a cleaner with a cilly name", I muttered as I scraped away at the cupboard over the cooker, "this needs hydrochloric acid or maybe sandblasting!"

It's amazing just how much muck we live with.

Rebecca and I washed all my teapots as well. In the end, by dint of much sweaty effort we did the kitchen, lounge and dining room in a total of about 15 person-hours. The rest of the house now holds all the items we didn't know what to do with and I prefer not to go into the utility room just at present.

In My Day

A schoolfriend of mine once said to me, "Your house is the most lived-in I've ever seen." Which just about sums it up. We had a cleaning lady who did the hall, stairs and landings of our rather large Victorian pile. Her name was Tillie Lawrence and she really did wear a scarf over rollered-hair and had varicose veins. The rest of the house sort of relaxed into a huge muddle. My mother did very little housework in terms of tidying, vaccuum cleaning and dusting. She did a lot of ironing - timing exactly how long it took her to do one of Daddy's shirts, and cooking. And until 1959, when we acquired a washing machine, she had to do the washing by hand. Sheets and shirt collars went to the laundry, but the rest she did, no mean task when there are 4 children. I did a lot of washing up, a job I could spin out for hours.

If visitors came, the best one could do was to pile all the junk onto a big armchair, cover it with a throw and hope that no-one tried to sit on it or thought that you were concealing Grandma's corpse. When I visited other houses I was always amazed by the effortlessly spotless look that they had. They probably shoved everything into cupboards.

Every now and then I would tackle the gargantuan task of tidying up. The method I used was to put all inappropriate items onto the big dining table, clean everything else, then work through the pile, putting things away, a system I still use today.

Interestingly, once my parents had retired to their little bungalow in Dorking, my mother kept it beautifully. So perhaps it was just the pressure of managing the vast house, 4 children and a myriad of outside interests that prevented her from doing the same by our place, rather than innate untidyness.

It does look nice and shiny downstairs, though!