I was cleaning the bathroom sink this morning and she came into my mind. Well, both of them did really. Not they were both domestic helps (I don’t really like the word ‘cleaner’ or indeed ‘char’), the other one, Mrs E., with her chihuahuas and her canaries and her habit for taking out her teeth when she sang along with the hymns on Songs of Praise was more of a babysitter. Mrs C. was Scottish and I thought of her because I remembered how the smell of the sink after she’d cleaned it used to make me feel safe. Was it Jiff that she used? Though I think it is called Ciff now, or maybe that is the French version. She brought order and calmness to the house on her weekly visits. A no-nonsense sort of body, our mother was less frenetic, less volatile when she was there. Mrs E., had the same effect. A mountain of a woman, or so she seemed to me then, and a through and through Lancastrian (I worked in that Mill when I was a girl, she told me once, pointing at a derelict black edifice above the fields where we were walking, on the way back to her little council house in the town.) They were steady women, grounded. I loved them.
