It is pitch black; like an idiot, I am teetering on a stool cleaning windows and muttering that there are far better ways to spend my life that doing chores. To say that I hate housework would be inaccurate. I don’t mind the jobs themselves, and I love the feeling when they are done, but, after decades of doing them, I’ve gone right off the necessity of housework.
I do not make a habit of nocturnal window-cleaning, but the rain-splattered panes had been bugging me for a while and, having rolled up my sleeves to do some heavy-duty cleaning, I didn’t feel like leaving this, the final job, till morning. When that rare mood takes me, it is one of those ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ things. And I was having company… and that means that in spite of my best efforts, I cannot help myself.
This is an ancient habit… conditioning from earliest childhood of which I have failed abysmally to be rid. ‘Having company’, although you know with absolute certainty that they will neither know, notice nor even care whether or not you have cleaned, means that you clean regardless. In part, it is a gesture of care and respect towards your guest… in part, it a promise of comfort and welcome. Partly, I begin to think, it is a form of self expression. Just as a artist may choose to veil a work in progress until he is happy with its form, so a home, that is always a work in progress, must feel ‘right’ in your own eyes so that you are comfortable when you open its doors.
It matters very little what you do or do not have. The decor and furnishings matter only in as far as they become an expression of who you are. You start with a blank canvas of empty rooms, and a home evolves, little by little, from the small things that make up your own life and personality. When you roll up your sleeves to make it presentable, what you are really doing is cleaning and polishing an image, both a snapshot of who you really are and the image of yourself that you wish others to see. Intimate truth and fantasy, hand in hand.
My home always used to be spotless, my garden neat as a pin. These days, things are rather more relaxed. Time was that I would have brandished the lawnmower at dawn, or got up early to scrub the floors just in case anyone came… conforming to the expected standards of a Yorkshirewoman who was raised in the era of well-scrubbed doorsteps and pristine lace curtains.
In spite of the itch to clean for company, my days of scrubbing the doorstep and blue-ing the curtains are over. I no longer choose to submit to that prescribed mask that was so often plastered over the face of poverty. Because that was the thing… in the days when poverty was the norm in my home county, when everyone was in the same boat, we all understood that small pride of showing a prim and proper image to the world. We hid the lacunae behind a surface so well starched that it crackled. It wasn’t about pretending you were any better than you were, or even better than your neighbours, it was about a stoic refusal to repine or advertise your family problems; it was about making the best of what you had too, taking pride in it. They aren’t bad things to subscribe to… only to become enslaved by.
The illusion held until a stranger wandered in and judged you on the whiteness of your lace curtains or the uniformity of the row of terraced houses of soot-blackened brick. They did not know what was going on behind their doors, how many times Mother was simply ‘not hungry’, or ‘really preferred’ just potatoes and gravy. Nor did they see the kinship between the families who shared a single outside toilet at the end of the street and who all hung their most intimate laundry like flags across the street. But kinship there was and a companionship that looked after its own.
I wasn’t born to the terraces. But I have lived that life too and seen it from both without and within. I have seen the shared laughter of having little, as well as the spiritual poverty that can live in the most beautiful of homes. Behind the closed doors, the well-scrubbed steps and the gleaming lace at blind windows, so many different stories played out. In one home a young woman might dream of the wider world, in another a new born child wail its welcome, in a third an old man kiss the cold cheek of his wife of fifty years before closing her eyes for a final time. Walk down that prim little street and you would never have known. Judge the repetitive façade and you missed the human stories behind it.
When I think back, I can see how easily habits and stereotypes are imposed upon us by others… others who follow, all unknowing, the dictates of their own. Many never find a way to break free. All the ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’ define so much of our public façade in line with our perceived social standing. The fear of letting go and being yourself in face of others’ disapproval or disparagement is very real.
The ‘dark, satanic mills’ of my childhood home were not simply the cotton and woollen mills with their machinery and smoking chimneys, they were also the mechanical behaviours, the habits and customs that were passed down and absorbed without thought. Some of them…like making a welcome for a guest… still hold value, if only because they imply a level of thought and care. Others were designed to mask a reality and their ghosts serve a darker purpose, allowing us to hide behind a tended image.
Yet behind our own conventional façades, each one of us is an individual, with our own story unfolding behind curtained eyes. We can disguise them with the trappings society recognises… the scrubbed doorstep of acceptability… yet we need to be prepared to cross the threshold with each other and see what lies deeper, learning to invite others in when the inner furnishings are unpolished and there are weeds in our emotional flowerbeds, just as much as we need to learn to cross the thresholds of others and embrace them for who they are, not what they may seem to be.
*images from Leodis: photographic archive of Leeds
What a fabulous piece. All feels so very familiar though never the life i lived.
LikeLiked by 3 people
It is in our genetic memory somewhere, I think 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
You really reminded me of why not being able to really “deep clean” my house bothers me so much. It’s a combination of everything you mentioned and mostly, a kind of pride that comes with keeping your home properly tidy. I had messes. I hate the layers of dust in my house and it really bothers me when the place feels grubby. I can’t do the kind of cleaning I always did, but when i can — even if NO one is coming that I know about, i like to know that anyone who drops in will see a house set in order.
Duke the Dogge at the basket in which we kept the toys. Garry said we should get some kind of “plastic thing” to hold them.
“They’re ugly,” I said.
“Who cares?” he asked. “it’s just something to hold a bunch of dog toys.”
“I care,” I said. It was obvious this answer completely baffled him and this may be one of the fundamental differences between the sexes.
He really doesn’t care, but I really do. He was never expected to keep a house. it wasn’t part of his upbringing. Work was important, but housekeeping? Nope.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Making house feel like a home is all in the details…and those details are probably different for all of us. Ani’s toys are in a black, plastic tub… but you can’t see it for the overflow and it is tucked away…. I get that 🙂
LikeLike
And yet… there you are, scrubbing away in the dark.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I know. We are weird creatures 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
What a great piece, Sue. It reminds me of growing up in my grandparents’ terrace, where the front room was the ‘best’ room, where nobody went unless we had visitors, and we spent most of our time in the ‘back room’ or parlour that led onto the scullery. My nan was very house-proud and, when she taught me to iron, I had to do everything, from the socks and pants to handkerchiefs and tea towels! My mum was the same, so my flat, and later cottage, was never pristine – something was always out of place or there was a duty area, just to remind me.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Clean, but not always tidy as far as I was concerned, after growing up in a similar environment. I still feel guilty about not always ironing sheets…
I still do it sometimes though, just for old times sake, I think 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
A fascinating article, Sue. We had a tradition growing up in Orkney, where the guest always got the best of what you had. But the cleaning didn’t have to be done, working on the farm or at the sea was time-consuming but, I do remember when my Mother came to visit she would clean for Adeline and weeks after Adeline would be on the phone to her asking, “Mary, where have you put this? Where have you put that?” lol xxx
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yes, the guest’s portion was always the best you had in Yorkshire too.
I remember my great grandmother deciding to help my mother by cleaning. She didn’t put everything in unfindable places, but she did scrub all the ‘grey stuff’ off the non-stick baking tins and polished the lino till it was like a ruddy ice-rink 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Oh no, everyone would have gone slipping around. xxx
LikeLike
I was small… and it was fun 🙂 She still polished her own lino by hand…straight-legged and bend from the waist…right into her nineties. xx
LikeLiked by 1 person
I can’t bend from the waist now! She must have been one healthy lady. xxx
LikeLike
She wasn’t…one of those proverbial ‘creaking gates’ 🙂 xx
LikeLiked by 1 person
Reblogged this on anita dawes and jaye marie.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I used to be like this, preferring not to see myself as others might, if I let my standards slip. These days I can’t keep up with the dust and grime, and it gets done if and when I feel like it. If your visitors are any good, they will only see you, and not the dust in the corner!
LikeLike
My regular vistors don’t care a jot and probably wouldn’t even notice the dust anyway… and I don’t care particularly these days either…. but when visitors are coming, I still can’t help myself…
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have abandoned routine housework… I just wait for the urge to clean something!
LikeLike
If I waited for that, I’d be living on contented squalor 😉
LikeLiked by 2 people
Did I mention that my eyesight is failing? Most of the time my house looks lovely and clean! (if I don’t wear my glasses)
LikeLike
I refuse to wear my glasses unless I’m driving. I like an Impressionistic world 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
Everything does look so much better without them!
LikeLike
Lovely piece, Sue. It’s what I could see, especially in the back to backs in Leeds, the whited doorsteps and the women in pinnies defying anyone to say their house wasn’t clean as a pin. We didn’t go in for that, and the ‘front room’ in my grandma’s house was the north-facing room that never needed cleaning because nobody ever went in it anyway once the children left home and Granddad died.
LikeLike
The front parlour…I remember those too. 🙂
My great grandma always wore a paisley ‘pinny’… a word I haven’t heard for years
LikeLike
My memories of Yorkshire are in a time warp. They stop round about 1980 and haven’t been renewed, so they’re all of old people with paisley pinnies, and kids in loon trousers. I stop before Tesco opened in Batley or Sainsbury’s in Dewsbury. There was still a cobbled market place in Birstall and Fieldhead Lane ran over the old railway bridge.
LikeLike
My memories really stop around then too… I went to France and things were very different when I came back…almost disconnected from the past, especially as I moved back to the other side of Leeds then.
LikeLike
Change really accelerated round that time, in all sorts of ways. I only went back occasionally and each time was like visiting a foreign country.
LikeLike
Yes, it was alays slightly uncomfortable going back, much as I loved the hills and the people…
LikeLike
It’s very politically incorrect, I know, but I found it bewildering that the immigrant communities were far more closed ‘communities’ than when I left. I was shocked to see the number of women in the full black veil and the men in the white pyjamas. It wasn’t like that in the 70s when the boys all wore northern soul gear (admittedly the girls didn’t go out) and it looked like integration working via youth culture. Took a wrong turning somewhere.
LikeLike
I’m glad we live in a society where people feel they can honour their roots, but I do hope that one day we can share a world with less prejudice, hatred and fear…
LikeLike
I think that was the thinking behind the ‘let them keep their own traditions’. It meant well, and for first generation people it’s what you’d expect from a humane society. But it has led to a fractured, inward-looking, sectarian society pulling in different directions. Like you, I hope that one day people will decide that the traditions that divide should be reserved for stories and get-togethers and not be the be all and end all of existence. And that goes for traditions like hunting and sexist behaviour too.
LikeLike
We certainly have a long way to go before we can call ourselves a society of acceptance and inclusion… on many fronts.
LikeLike
One step forward two back.
LikeLike
I’m sort of hoping it is the other way round…slow progress, but better than none…
LikeLike
You’re probably right. On some fronts there’s real, if slow progress, then you get nuts like Trump popping up and rallying the crusaders…
LikeLiked by 1 person
My lips are sealed on that particular score…it is a family friendly blog, after all 😉
LikeLike
Point taken 🙂
LikeLike
😀
LikeLiked by 1 person
Now you mention it, pinnies were always paisley. I wonder why?
LikeLike
I don’t know…but they always were. Wonder if you can still buy them?
LikeLike
On Dewsbury market probably 🙂
LikeLike
I used to have a stall there 😉
LikeLike
Wow! Class! Ali Baba’s cave had nothing on Dewsbury market 🙂
LikeLike
I know 🙂 I loved it!
LikeLike
🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
A great piece, Sue, which resonated with me on many levels. I have become more relaxed about not living in a fastidiously clean house – except before visitors come and before going away on holiday. And for New Year’s day! Husband doesn’t understand the need to clean the house from top to bottom before we go away but the thought of returnign to a messy house would ruin my holiday. I have a friend (she’s from Yorkshire) and we’ve known each other for more than quarter of a century so we both know we don’t always live in dust-free beautifully clean homes on a daily basis – yet we each still go into manic house-cleaning activity if the other is coming to stay.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That made me chuckle, Mary. I can’t go away, even for the weekend, without cleaning…but I can fail to wash up teaspoons till I run out on a daily basis…as long as no-one is coming 🙂 We really are odd creatures…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Reblogged this on Blog Pad 2017.
LikeLike
Thanks, Henrietta 🙂
LikeLike
You are welcome!
LikeLiked by 1 person
I do so agree Sue, I had all the above drummed into me as child, I learned from example that everything must be just so, everyone who turned up on the doorstep had to be fed ( even if we got less and as you say mum least) There was a day for every job, Monday washing, Tuesday cleaning Wednesday and Saturday shopping, Thursday And Friday I forget, except we ate fish every Friday. Sunday church.
What strikes me most is it was so much keeping up appearances, almost as if it was a sin to have problems. You brought back so many memories and thoughts 💗💜
LikeLike
Fish on Fridays… oh yes 🙂
It was never that regular in my childhood, but there was that attitude of everything being alright as long as no-one could see that it wasn’t.
…And I still put the kettle on as soon as anyone walks through the door…
LikeLike
Me too, me too 💗💜🌹
LikeLiked by 1 person
Reblogged this on Sun in Gemini.
LikeLiked by 1 person
really good read.
LikeLike
Thanks, Lucinda.
LikeLike
The beauty of your blog, Sue, is that you so eloquently express those issues we all share. There is a slight gender difference. While I may be madly cleaning the interior, prepping the food that I find acceptable, the husband is manicuring the lawn, washing the car…priorities we learned at an early age and hard to shake. An excellent piece…I’m off to vacuum.
LikeLike
It is odd how these things stay with us 🙂
House and garden have mainly been my responsibility over the years, what with one thing and another. Now there’s just me and the dog…and though she will dig holes ( whether I like it or not) she’s scared of the lawnmower 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
Love this Sue. My upbringing also included cleaning for company — even if the company was family or very close friends with whom we spent lots of time. And, like you, I still do it to this day, even though I am far more relaxed when it’s just me. I also grew up in a time when people cared about what others thought of them — that I never subscribed to though. I have never gone out of my way to offend anyone and I’m not rude and don’t do outrageous things but I have always believed that I have the right to live my life as I see fit and it’s okay if not everyone agrees with my choices. It was an unusual stance for the time, I admit, but that didn’t stop me.
LikeLike
That doesn’t surprise me at all, Fransi. 🙂
There is a vast difference between conforming because you daren’t do otherwise and being considerate of other people’s feelings.
I’ve always felt it to be a mark of respect to clean before guests arrive…respect both for them and for me. Even though I know my usual guest doesn’t care a fig about what the place looks like. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
I agree Sue, it is a sign of respect.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I clean for company, and that’s about it, Sue. We’re pretty disheveled the rest of the time. 🙂 This post struck a cord from my old counseling days when I did home visits with struggling families. There may have been a lack of money and pretty things and spotless homes, but there was often a richness of heart and dreams amidst a community that hung together and helped each other to the best of their abilities. As we say in the biz, never judge a book by its cover. 🙂
LikeLike
It is all too easy to cover the holes in the heart with ‘things’, but the holes remain. Living in poorer communities and circumstances, you learn fast the things tat really matter cannot be bought.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wow. A terrific piece. I feel like I’ve seen it. Well done. 🙂
LikeLike
Thanks, Lynette. I think it is a familiar pace for many of us. 🙂
LikeLike
Beautiful story. Both love and hate passed down from generation to generation. We are encouraged to look beyond our past in creating our future but it’s the bedrock of who we are. Hard to let go of and sometimes we don’t even want to.😘
LikeLike
Some things are worth preservig, others need to be discarded. I think the real danger is to accept without looking or questioning the real value or lack of it such teachings hold.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Totally agree!😘🌈
LikeLiked by 1 person
Beautiful post. I grew up on a street like that too… life in the north west was not much different to life in the north east. With sporty teens in the house though, nothing stays clean for long, so I do hate cleaning chores, but that will probably pass once they’ve moved on and it’s just me Conor and Carys at home. I’m not so sure I’ll like that, even with less cleaning to do. How time flies.
LikeLike
It flies all too quickly…and it does feel odd when they are gone…. but you soon settle into tidiness, the missing aroma of sweaty socks and the inevitable sock-fluff in the bathroom 🙂
LikeLike
Lol! Thank you for that! 😆
LikeLike
😀
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Die Erste Eslarner Zeitung – Aus und über Eslarn, sowie die bayerisch-tschechische Region!.
LikeLiked by 1 person
What a wonderful piece, Sue. Your writing has left me feeling quite nostalgic and thoughtful now. Thank you.
LikeLike
Thanks, Wendy. Memories do odd things to the heart and mind.
LikeLike
They do indeed. Odd, and in this case rather comforting too. Thank you.
LikeLike
🙂
LikeLike
Loved this Sue. I used to be a lot like your description of those who cleaned incessantly, God forbid someone would visit by surprise and everything wasn’t in its place, lol. I think the years and wisdom we gain through them turn our thoughts more toward a well lived life. As long as things are clean, they can stand to be a little untidy for awhile. ❤
LikeLike
Untidy works for me… within limits (I can’t help eing a Virgo 🙂 ) but I do like things to be clean underneath. Oddly though, clean, untidy, grubby…I neither know, notice, nor care when I go and see friends. ❤
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ahh, a true sign of friendship. ❤
LikeLike
People always matter more than things ❤
LikeLiked by 1 person
As they should. ❤
LikeLike
Indeed ❤
LikeLiked by 1 person
I am constantly amazed at how little things you do inspire such great prose! I’m sure Ani keeps you busy cleaning – your home and her!
LikeLike
I get to clean the house, but not the dog…she’s a self cleaning variety ( or so she insists when I mention bathtime…) 😉
LikeLike
She always looks brushed and clean, with such a shiny coat!
LikeLike
That’s mostly natural… though I do resort to bribery and corruption occasionally to brush her 😉
LikeLiked by 1 person
Did you ever tell us how you and Ani found each other? How old is she? Since we lost Angel, I am a vicarious dog owner….
LikeLike
She’s a rescue, Noelle. We looking for a dog to train as an assistance dog for Nick… then he moved out into his own place again and I had suddenly acquired a dog. 🙂
She has a romantic beginning though, six years ago in Ireland… https://scvincent.com/2014/06/02/notes-from-a-small-dog-xxxix/
LikeLike
Pingback: September is the BEST time for what activity? | ADD . . . and-so-much-more