On the first day cleaning in Trinity College, I’m introduced to my supervisor, given two blue cleaning smocks with deep pockets for keys and dust cloths and doorstoppers, and brought to the housekeepers’ kitchen in the basement of the arts block. I recognise some of the women from my student days; it’s a mark of the place that many stay for decades, putting the guts of a working life into Trinity’s housekeeping department.
I’m set to work as a spare. If no one is sick or skiving, spares are put doing heavy-duty cleaning tasks that are either not in the duties of a specific cleaner or left undone by a cleaner for reasons of idleness, mutiny or physical incapability.
These tasks include dusting and scrubbing areas that don’t get daily or weekly cleans, scraping the chewing gum off the underside of desks in libraries, polishing library balustrades, windows and high window ledges, taking down library books and thoroughly cleaning the shelves.
The brief is to clean only as high as you can reach; I’m fairly tall so I clean more shelves than most women and fewer shelves than some men.
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Any given day could involve cleaning the stairwells in the arts block, sweeping down the tumbleweedy dustballs and hair clumps before mopping. The stairwells are cosy, enclosed little worlds shut off from the rest of the arts block by heavy fire doors. Students and lecturers who come in early up freshly washed stairs either grimace apologetically and tread lightly, taking two steps at a time to lessen their footprint, or pretend not to see the cleaner or bucket and saunter past as normal. I try not to wish a painful fall on the latter.
As a spare, I’m constantly checking in with my supervisor: where am I going today, who am I working with, what keys do I collect from the security desk, what needs to be done, is it a deep clean or a daily servicing? Spare work is exciting in the beginning but after a few months, most spares just want their own area. (A cleaner’s area is the place she cleans; areas have long ago been divided up according to space measurement and busyness or frequency of cleaning required.) If a cleaner leaves and is not replaced, her area can be split among co-workers on her floor, extra square footage that can cause ructions unless overtime is given to accommodate the extra work.
Seeing so many different parts of the college with nobody else around feels like sneaking downstairs as a child when your parents are asleep. The rhythms of the college are different in the early morning. You see the secret servants’ staircases (in the provost’s house), the secret tunnels (connecting the arts block and Long Room Library) and the small, almost-hidden doors of cubbyholes used to store cleaning supplies.
Much of the college is in darkness at this time; the cleaners are the ones turning on lights and unlocking doors. It’s a topsy-turvy world: doors that are locked during normal hours are open in the early hours; doors that are open during normal hours are locked in the early hours. I rush through the offices; I prefer cleaning lecture rooms with enormous maps or geology specimens, old libraries with comically dull book titles, display cases containing precious manuscripts, which I polish extra slowly.
One of my favourite things in this job is being alone in gorgeous old rooms at sunrise
I’m put working with a cleaner in the museum building: she’s going for surgery in a few days and I’ll cover her work when she’s off. As we fill a bucket from a sink in an office facing on to a sunrise over the cricket pitch, she looks out the window and shakes her head saying, “Sometimes I think I have the best job in the world”.
I, too, fall in love with this gorgeous building. It’s palazzo-style, built in 1857, domed and pillared and grand as anything. An imperial staircase divides into two flights in opposite directions; you can’t help but walk down it and feel like a debutante announcing yourself at a royal ball, even if you’re sweeping it one step at a time.
As extra help, I’m put washing down the marble banisters and stone staircases. I mislay myself in the secret turns and nooks and back stairs and front stairs and side stairs. I walk extra steps not realising I can get from one area to another through a lecture room, instead going all the way downstairs to go back up again. The women working there are friendly and welcoming and I find myself wishing for an area like this. Away from the gaze of the supervisor in the arts block, this building makes its own rules.
My favourite task is: scrubbing a tea-stained kitchen sink with cream cleaner and a yellow sponge, badgering the steel up to a decent shine.
Things that annoy me most about my cleaning job:
- Popcorn.
- Ignorance.
- Butty little screws that jut out of mirrors snagging my cloth.
- Toilets left in a condition that stop just short of a dirty protest.
- Equipment that doesn’t work.
When I first started, I told my supervisor that my hoover wasn’t working and asked for a new one, causing a bout of hysterical laughter between her and the houseman. The houseman led me to a tiny room full of hoover parts – a makeshift hoover hospital – told me to take what I needed, and handed me a roll of black tape to cobble it together.
Meanwhile, there are things I’ve learned from cleaning.
Your dossing room (your “office”) will be the cleanest room in your area because whenever you hear footsteps you have to leap up and let on you’re cleaning. (A cleaner’s office could be the actual office of a lecturer who is on sabbatical or who doesn’t come into work early, or it could be a hidden nook or corner of a library that you can take an unofficial break in.) A supervisor once happened on me sitting in an office, frantically typing on my laptop, trying to meet a pressing writing deadline during a quiet moment. I just had time to close the laptop and hop up with my cloth (top tip: always keep a cloth and spray handy). Maybe it was my guilty face, but she decided to inspect the room, running her fingers over the bookshelves (dust-free), peered closely at the table (spotless), checked the floors (crumb-free). My heart was thudding when she approached the laptop: if she felt its warmth, I couldn’t pass it off as the lecturer’s whose room it was. My supervisor left, congratulating me on such a clean office. I never used the laptop in work again.
Wet the mop more than you think, the going will be easier.
Keep busiest when you haven’t slept. If you stop or slow down, you’ll flag. Do your toughest jobs (polishing brasses, digging at the knottiest carpets with a hoover, scraping chewing gum from the underside of desks) when tiredest.
Always carry a prop (cloth and cleaning spray, dustpan and brush, bin bag) if you’re going to another cleaner’s area for a chat.
The soap dispensers in the gents’ toilets seldom run low.
When alcohol is involved, a cardboard recycle bin can seem like a legitimate toilet.
Never clear up what looks like rubbish from the contemporary art gallery on campus. When I briefly cleaned the Douglas Hyde Gallery, a cleaner told me how he had previously swept up and binned empty Tayto wrappers and Coke cans from the floor of the exhibition space, only to be told afterwards that it was an art installation he’d just demolished. Check with your supervisor before you touch anything, he warned me. Ask her: is this art or is it rubbish because I haven’t a f**king breeze.
[ Wunderland: Imaginative writing of feeling and substance by Catríona LallyOpens in new window ]
I’m put dusting books and shelves in the Lecky Library, then cleaning chewing gum from the undersides of the tables. Something about the muffled carpeting of the Lecky is very soothing. I deep-clean the desk surfaces, grey-blue Formica with indents of rivers and tributaries, the better to catch the dirt. At the bottom of the stairs on the lower-ground floor is the desk I favoured as a student. I remember laying out pages and pages of notes and handwriting essays about 20th-century female novelists, never suspecting that I’d be a 21st-century female novelist. I’m put deep-cleaning tall library stacks in the basement on my own, shelves and shelves of books and journals, which could be a decent setting for the chase scene of an action movie. I can picture hiding between the shelves then overturning them to thwart the baddie.
One morning I’m hoovering the exam hall, a beautiful, echoey, 18th-century building with a vaulted ceiling. It’s dark first thing but fills magically with sunlight when dawn comes in, dust-motes landing on the chandelier that’s someone else’s job to dust. One of my favourite things in this job is being alone in gorgeous old rooms at sunrise. I hoover the chessboard floor tiles, obeying sudden urges to leap from black to white in a one-woman fixed-to-win game – I’m Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, I’m Ron during the high-stakes chess game in Harry Potter.
It’s nice to have freedom of movement in this room, having sat and sweated my way through exams here, struggling to fill the notebooks allotted, agog at students doing the same exam asking for extra paper. The summer following my final exams, I was covering for the cleaner who usually cleaned the English department on the fourth floor of the arts block in Trinity. I cleaned an office with boxes that contained an exam script I had written the previous month. It was like another life in that box, layers of life, differently lived, at full-tilt collision.
I love cleaning the Old Library on my own, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of musty old books and marble busts of dead, thinky men. A bulb is on the fritz in one of the alcoves, it fizzes and flashes, adding to the atmosphere. I buff the brown lino of the floor that runs the length of the Long Room Library, those 65m putting the long into the Long Room – almost the length of an indoor running track. Every buffer machine is different, like temperamental, elderly relatives with their own peculiar habits and notions that you have to adapt to. The cleaner I’m covering for has me trained in on the figaries of this particular buffer: where to rest the machine (low on your hips) how to gently manoeuvre it side to side, how to go with it rather than force it (like a lot of cleaning tips, a metaphor for life maybe).
I know things about my co-workers that I don’t know about my close friends – what time of day they shower at, what they wear in bed
I’m fairly confident but confidence is of no use the first day I buff alone. I walk the length of the floor buffing gently from side to side, then turn slowly to buff the next strip of lino, like a groundsman mowing a football pitch. On one of my turns, I twist the machine too quickly and it takes umbrage, skiting off in its preferred direction, knocking me off my feet before scudding across the floor and bashing into a glass case containing a folio of a precious manuscript.
I’m dazed on the floor, crawling frantically across the lino, wondering how much damage is done, if I’ll have to pay for it. Fortunately, the machine is shaped like a capital L: the bumper part of the buffer has crashed into the metal bottom of the case, the glass display is intact. I coax it back into obedience like a contrary pet and we sway gently together over the next couple of weeks, getting up the most satisfying shine on the brown lino: easily provable if I haven’t the work done.
Part of my job in this area is dusting the leather-bound books with a feather duster at 9am as the first coachloads of American tourists arrive. They take pictures, shouting, “Look, the janitor!” while I duck and dive from the action shot, the wild beast going about her business in her natural habitat.
One morning after I clock off, I go to a cafe near Trinity to write. The lad at the till spies the Trinity ID card in my wallet and tells me that Trinity staff and students get a discount with their ID. “That’s great,” I say, handing him my card. “I’m studying in Trinity,” he says. “Ah,” I say, “what course?” “English.” “That’s what I studied too,” I say. “Oh?” he says brightly, “are you lecturing there now?” “No,” I say, “I’m cleaning there now.” To say his face fell sounds metaphorical but it was literal.
I’ve always been drawn to manual work for its sense of completion and satisfaction. I spent childhood summers on my uncle’s small farm in west Mayo and loved helping to wash out the milk churns after the cows were milked, clean the milking parlour and the animal bedding afterwards. It’s a strange teenager who will willingly get up early on school holidays to shovel cow dung, but I found a quiet joy in the ritual of it.
As a student, I earned money as a postwoman, carer, childminder and cleaner. I prefer routine work that is predictable and constant. If I were wealthy, I’d hire someone to cook for me but would be happy to clean my own toilet: cooking is the drudge-work for me. A meal worked on for hours is eaten in minutes; a bathroom stays cleaner for longer. I like having a job completely unrelated to writing and the feeling of having done the physical work before sitting down to write.
When I emerge from Trinity’s Front Arch at 9.30am, from quiet cobbles and grassy spaces into rush-hour bustle, I always feel a thrill, like I’ve been let out of school early. Watching people stride to work, I’m grateful that my paid work is done, I won’t be hemmed in by a desk and chair: the sheer freedom of this life. I can choose where to write and what to write and how to write it.
I also like having co-workers, people to discuss the weather with, the darkness of the mornings, the public transport failings, the price of bread. There’s weekly chat about the special offers and deals in the German discount supermarkets, which bargains are worth it. When slabs of Coke or Fanta are heavily discounted or tins of biscuits or tubs of sweets are half-price at Christmas, one of the cleaners who drives or has access to a car will offer to pick up some for those of us who don’t drive.
I know things about my co-workers that I don’t know about my close friends – what time of day they shower at, what they ate for dinner last night, what they wear in bed. Cleaners mostly shower at night.
Caitríona Lally is the author of two novels, Eggshells and Wunderland. This essay is an edited extract from her new memoir Home Economics, published by New Island.
