Cleaning Up Politics – The background to my new novel
The primary influences on my second novel, Coming Clean, were an unlikely combination of cleaners and politicians.
Earlier in our married life, when we were both working and had young children, we employed a cleaner for a couple of hours each week, albeit with a large dose of liberal, middle–class guilt. Several came and went over a number of years, all from Central or Eastern Europe, most often Bulgaria. I was working from home, and apart from feeling a need to tidy up our house before they arrived to clean it, we more or less left them to get on with it. However, often as I stopped work to make a coffee (and offer them one that they always refused), we would get into conversation. Some spoke good English, some less so, but I always sensed an interesting back story. Several were educated young women who felt their work opportunities were limited in their own country. Others, often older, had left home to support the family they had left behind. I wondered what they felt as they cleaned our children’s bedrooms, rearranging the soft toys and tidying crumpled duvets. And I mused on what they made of our lives as they cleaned our bathroom and dusted our photograph frames, then took their long journey home to a less leafy part of London.
By time I came to write this book, we had decided we could no longer justify the expense of cleaners, but I found myself wanting further insight into their lives. I was helped by journalist Nick Duerden’s excellent book, Dishing the Dirt, in which he interviews a variety of cleaners about their different clients’ homes. But I was also put in touch with a lovely Bulgarian woman who was cleaning for a friend of a friend. While I learnt something from all those who cleaned our house, I am particularly indebted to her for giving of her time to share her own story with me, and for putting me right on a few details. Her own story of self-sacrifice in moving to England to support her children, and the homesickness she experienced initially, was worthy of a book in its own right.
I have always been interested in politics and have to admit that this interest has not just been in policy but in the characters who inhabit that world. I am very happy to be rid of several characters and ‘psychodramas’ that have dogged our political life in recent years. I have however retained a firm belief that many, possibly most, politicians are people of good conscience who go into politics for sound reasons rather than egotistical self-gain and, let’s face it, somebody has to do it. In writing about their world, I am not indebted to any single politician but to a number of diaries and autobiographies – in particular, Chris Mullin’s excellent diaries charting his years as a Labour MP and minister, and the unashamedly salacious diaries of Alan Clark, memorably brought to life on the BBC by John Hurt. If those were my initial political influences, there has clearly been plenty of more recent material on which to draw as well.