| Make your house a (clean and tidy) home |
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| Written by Penny Kitchen, 2006 | |
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A home is the biggest investment we’re likely to make, so what’s wrong with taking good care of it? Not a thing, according to Anthea Turner who hosts BBC’s Perfect Housewife. Penny Kitchen dusts off her copy of Mrs Beeton and goes to meet her.
Housework – dontcha just hate it?!?!” as Glenda Slagg, Private Eye’s purveyor of tabloid rant, might fume. Ask any woman that question and she will nod in enthusiastic agreement – or will she? Since I became a work-at-home freelance, housework has never looked so attractive. I find myself sneaking downstairs to wash the dishes or flick around a duster – anything rather than sit here at my computer, doing ‘real’ work. And a poll amongst my women friends shows me that I am not alone. But perhaps our knee-jerk reaction to the question isn’t anti-housework per se, but the implication that keeping a house clean and attractive is somehow demeaning ‘women’s work’. And where there is a man sharing the house (but not the housework) repetitive tidying, cleaning and clothes-washing soon become polarising issues, with resentment building on both sides.  Anthea (C) and two of the participants in the first series of Perfect Housewife. We love watching other people clean: we will pay to attend a Putting the House to Bed day at a National Trust property (see last year’s Woman’s World) and “Tsk, tsk” at the telly when Kim and Aggie find another fridge festering with dirt and bacteria to tackle on Channel 4’s How Clean is Your House? But when it comes to putting our own house in order, how many of us can say that we keep things shipshape? A recent perusal of Keeping House by Cindy Harris (Ryland Peters & Small, 2004) with its chapters on “sparkling surfaces” and “gleaming kitchens”, is daunting to a disorganised housekeeper like me, despite the author’s reassuring words in the introduction: “Today, who has time to worry about how to clean silver, or where to find that unique brand of stain remover? Most of us don’t know the intricate ways to maintain our home in tiptop shape. My mother, who came from a rural community, knew a hundred methods for the upkeep of fine wood; she knew about the shelf life of food, recipes for stain removal and easy ways to fold sheets and make the bed... She always had a quick method for disposing of chores so that we could all sit around the table and tell stories.” And that is where Anthea and Cindy seem to be in 100 per cent agreement. Tackle housework efficiently, in a minimum of time, and you have time remaining for paid work or relaxation. Anthea Turner, it has to be said, has a very big house to keep gleaming and she has paid help to do it. “However,” she points out, “I don’t ask anyone to do things here that I wouldn’t be prepared to roll up my sleeves and do myself.” We were chatting over coffee in her large, farmhouse-style kitchen, watched by her four sleek black cats and two golden retrievers. It is in this house near Dunsfold, Surrey that Anthea’s housekeeping hopefuls come to get lessons on household management 2006-style. “The people – mainly women – we select for Perfect Housewife are very intelligent and have nice homes, but somewhere along the line they have lost the will, or the ability, to run a home along methodical lines. All this business about cleaning being something you do only if you’ve nothing better to do is absolute rubbish. You can’t do it unless you are very organised and efficient, which allows you to complete the job in a short space of time. “The programme is not designed to put the cause of women back 50 years like some critics have said. But if you are organised and efficient you can run your home usually better than you are running it at the moment and you will have more free time. It is liberating – a home should not be a noose round your neck.” I mentioned my aunt’s battered copy of Mrs Beeton and Anthea immediately reached for a copy of her own on the kitchen shelf. There isn’t an equivalent all-encompassing volume on household management for the modern woman, I suggested – might she consider writing one herself? “Maybe I should! Life for women has changed a great deal since Mrs Beeton’s day,” she replied. “We have such busy lives today and we have to work in our homes within those parameters.” In fact, it isn’t Isabella Beeton but William Morris who has inspired Anthea’s thinking: “I’m a great believer in his philosophy that you shouldn’t have anything in your home that isn’t beautiful or useful. Or possibly terribly sentimental. But if you’re going to keep precious sentimental things, tidy them away in a special box. One woman on the programme kept every letter anyone had ever sent her!” The programme team spend two weeks with each participant in their own homes, their first task to help with the practicalities of disposing of their clutter to tips or charity shops. “This is not a makeover show where we transform the place for them – they have to work extremely hard – and we don’t go into their personal lives: they alone can make the decision about what to throw away. “Most of them had kitchen drawers filled with stuff they never used, wardrobes with clothes they never wore. One woman refused to go into a room in her house because hanging in the wardrobe was her wedding dress from a disastrous marriage. ‘Why don’t you get rid of it?’ I asked her and she gave me lots of lame reasons why. We didn’t show this on camera, but in the end she and I cut the dress up into tiny pieces and then burned them on the barbecue.” As well as being a television celebrity, Anthea is a businesswoman with her own contract furnishing business. Organising a house should be like a business, she says: “Some of the people who came on the programme would have received their P45s years ago had their house been their job.” She has no time for moaning minnies either: “If you don’t want to do housework, then hire someone to do it and go out to work, but at the risk of sounding like Mrs Thatcher, if you do want to do it, then get on with it, do it properly and stop moaning!” She also doesn’t accept that just because you live in a modest house, you can’t be proud of it. “My first home was entirely furnished from second-hand shops – ‘charity shop chic’ they call it now – but it doesn’t mean you can’t make it just how you like it. A bigger house simply means the potential to make a bigger mess. I know people who have help in the house and they’re still not organised. “And don’t let anyone tell you that their house ‘is a mess, but it’s clean’, because that’s nonsense! You can’t clean a house properly when it’s untidy.” One participant in the first series of Perfect Housewife was WI member Linda Singleton. “She came to the programme knowing quite a lot, knowing what she needed to do,” recalled Anthea, “but despite this she hadn’t been doing it. She had a pretty big house, so she shoved things into cupboards, out of the way. We gave her a deadline and she really cleared that house out!” Anthea is outspoken against the feminists who insisted that homemaking was inferior to climbing the career ladder. “Homes have slipped way down the priority list over the years. There is a whole generation who have never done domestic science at school and whose mothers had read Germaine Greer and decided that the best thing their daughters could do is concentrate on their career or marrying someone rich. Well, the sad truth is that they end up with neither the career nor the rich husband nor a nice home they can enjoy. “A home is probably the biggest expenditure you will make in your life, so why should you not want to look after it? It’s the place you retreat to and if everything is going right in the home, your family will love to be there and you will want to invite people into it.” *A new series of Perfect Housewife begins this autumn on BBC3. |
