Leith on life: Confessions of a guilty liberal

I have a cleaning lady.

Why is it I feel embarrassed typing those words? I could amend them to be less presumptuous and more accurate: a cleaner. Some cleaners, actually: a rotating cast, mostly but not always ladies; or, less patronisingly, women.

I should make clear that she/they are in no way a “daily” (hah! I wish) or a “charlady.” The duties of the people who whisk through my family home twice a week do not include grooming horses, polishing silverware or airing out the bedrooms in the west wing. Their role is simply to roar through the place cramming everything into the nearest cupboard, and doing, well—whatever it is you do that makes everything look clean and tidy and honk suffocatingly of bleach.

Yet however it’s couched, it feels somehow taboo, at once boastful and shaming—like admitting that you’re a tax exile, or take a table every year at the Conservative Party’s Black and White Ball, or spend your evenings on the terrace sipping mint juleps to the sound of spirituals drifting on the wind from the cotton fields.

I submit to the uneasiness because this—the uneasiness—seems to me an odd thing, and not unique to me. Why is it when people of all classes and situations outsource all sorts of services—from the care of our children to babysitters and nurseries, to the making of our lunchtime sandwiches to Pret— Why does it feel like it is this—rather than, say, eating out or taking the odd taxi or getting a £30 haircut—that risks tipping us from being members of the ordinary hard-working middle classes into the plutocratic 1 per cent?

In 2011, a survey by insurers Churchill found that 12 per cent of adults in the United Kingdom employ a domestic helper. It’s still a minority—but not a tiny one. And yet it is a bashful 12 per cent.

My hunch is that we’re psychologically contorted about it because it probes at things about ourselves we don’t like or don’t quite understand. There is the obvious anxiety that it seems a bit Downton Abbey. Then, underneath that, something more opaque: a sense that outsourcing services in your own home is a moral failing: a reflex Presbyterianism that says the decent homeowner scrubs his own step and washes his own nets. Yet there is the contradictory sense—which used to apply here, though not in Europe, to waiting tables also—that domestic work is somehow degrading. This is the same complex that downgrades the work of full-time mothers or house-husbands.

And an outward shyness fences with an inward sense of entitlement. You feel at once guilty for employing someone to clean your bath—as if by not doing so you’d save them the indignity of this degrading labour by, er, doing them out of a job they want. At the same time, you find yourself feeling annoyed when you catch them knocking off early—and, in turn, despise yourself for the pettiness of it. Why do they just cram stuff into cupboards, you sulk. If they were going a bit more slowly they wouldn’t have done for that nice teapot, you reason.

Then you remember that the reason they go hell for leather is that you’ve asked them to do in a couple of hours what would take you most of a day. And that, though it would be only reasonable for them to say, “Your children are pigs and your house is a sty and if you want to come home to spick and span you need to book at least seven hours a time,” they won’t.

And it then occurs to you that, with all the time you spend wringing your hands about it, it’s probably inevitable you have to pay someone else to wring your dishcloths.