'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, GBP30 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. 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? Buy the book to continue reading
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