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Dishing the Dirt by Nick Duerden review – the hidden lives of house cleaners

<span>Photograph: Pakula Piotr/Alamy</span>
Photograph: Pakula Piotr/Alamy

Nick Duerden sets out to discover what it is like to clean houses for a living by talking to migrant workers who service the homes of contemporary Londoners. His eclectic cast of informants belong to this transitory workforce, men and women (but mostly women) who “hold the key to our real identities, to the people we really are, behind closed doors”. The result is an elegant portrait of the strained intimacies that grow up between cleaner and employer in 21st-century Britain.

Dishing the Dirt is not a deeply researched tract, nor a tub-thumping polemic about precarious employment. Instead, driving Duerden’s inquiry is a fascination for the complex interior lives of people who usually play an off-stage role in our personal dramas. Despite the size of the industry, with perhaps as many as one in three UK households employing a cleaner, the realities of waged domestic labour are little known beyond those who actually do it. Duerden offers the people who vacuum carpets a chance to speak freely and at length about their hopes and dreams, anxieties and disappointments. It is less an exercise in titillating gossip than a study in what makes all of us painfully human.

Many of the book’s voices describe the classic migrant experiences of transience and culture shock, a feeling of existing between two worlds accompanied by a powerful compulsion to improve one’s economic situation. He meets young mothers sending remittances to children back home, school-leavers driven abroad by sluggish economies and corrupt governments, drifters and chancers of all ages answering internet ads and sofa-surfing in the bedsits of friends already earning good money in London.

For some, the gamble has paid off. Yuliya left Bulgaria for Britain in 2007, speaking little English and knowing no one except for a handful of fellow migrants in Surbiton, where she started cleaning the smart houses of its resident professional classes. Today, she owns a flat, drives a Mercedes and runs her own successful cleaning business.

Others tell darker stories, such as Amirah, a victim of human trafficking, who left Indonesia and her two daughters having been told she’d take up a well-paid, live-in post as housemaid to a diplomat in central London. Instead, she found herself cooking, cleaning and nannying seven days a week for a large Saudi family in East Acton. Her passport was confiscated, her salary never appeared, and her bedroom was a closet containing the household boiler which clanked through the night. Befriended by a cleaner in the neighbouring house, Amirah managed to escape but to an uncertain future. Duerden leaves her awaiting the Home Office’s verdict on her request to remain in the UK.

Other interviewees have quirkier backstories, like the pill-popping former journalist who discovered a strange kind of peace cleaning houses, or the young woman who is housekeeping for an older couple to finance her artistic hobbies.

Strangest of all are those serving the niche market for naked cleaners. Duerden meets Brandy, a mother in her late 30s who earns £45 an hour dusting, ironing and making beds in the nude while her clients (all male) gaze on, similarly unclad. The rules are strict: you can look, but not touch. Most surprising is Brandy’s enthusiasm for her unusual line of work: “It got me out of a dark period,” she tells Duerden, “and it’s been liberating.”

From this composite picture emerge two types of employers, those who prefer their cleaners to be invisible and those seeking a human connection. Duerden’s informants often slip unseen in and out of empty houses, removing soiled bedsheets, disposing of decomposing foodstuffs, making all things new again. Monika, 35 years old and from Slovakia, worked for a princess in Dubai whom she never met: “I entered the room to clean it after she had left it. When she returned, the room was clean – as if by magic.”

We are so accustomed to the shadowy non-presence of cleaners in our homes that it is startling to read of the job’s intensely sociable side. Some employers enjoy nothing more than to sit down with their cleaning lady for a cuppa and heart-to-heart chat. Yuliya worked for a heavy smoker who put on the kettle and lined up cigarettes at the start of her shift. The arty housekeeper-millennial eats regularly with her employers, who have almost become surrogate parents.

Duerden wonders whether these efforts at befriending are driven by middle-class guilt. In the afterword, he reveals his own decision to stop employing cleaners, believing it important “to teach our teenage children how to clean up after themselves, before it was too late”. His book succeeds brilliantly in dismantling casual assumptions about the drudgery of cleaning – and about the kinds of people who do it for a living.

Dishing the Dirt: The Hidden Lives of House Cleaners is published by Canbury (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.