A household tip

William (aged six) really made me laugh yesterday. My OH had just accepted my offer of a cup of tea, and William piped up: "Daddy, why is Mummy your servant?"

In fact, I am currently servant to all of the men in my house, William included. And as the children get older it's getting harder and harder to keep up with the pace.

As soon as one room is cleared of detritus, the men move in and dedicate themselves to destroying it again. Today I cleared the living room twice and yet from where I sit, I can see: Lego blocks, a toddler's computer, a piece of wooden railway track, a discarded green straw, Daddy Pig, Peppa Pig and Rebecca Rabbit. In the other direction, the purple top of a plastic casserole dish, a knight in armour, a pencil rubber and a toy car (- it's only because the OH is away tonight that it isn't also strewn with papers, wrappers and mobile phones).

And believe me, that's tidy.

Despite the evidence which assails me on a daily basis, I still find it hard to accept that I am the only person in my house who picks anything up and puts it back. The only one who does all the washing, the ironing, the folding and the putting-away. The vacuuming, the dusting, and the polishing; the bringing-in of shopping and the putting-out of bin bags. The cleaning of pots, plates and pans, floors, walls, baths and especially the lavatories. Oh, the lavatories - all four of them.

For inspiration, I think back to my grandmother Eileen Mary Yates (1917-1988), who had the ability to render any house spotless within two hours (- mind you, she had no blog to waylay her). And I remember her shiny dustbin: emptied once a week (those were the days!), with no overflowing, no recycling, no having to drive to the local council tip to discard rubbish that won't fit in the dustbin (round here you are only allowed to fill one narrow wheelie-bin with unrecyclable trash, which is then emptied once a fortnight. No other rubbish will be removed, and the lid of the bin has to be firmly closed). And I wonder: how did she do it?

Well, she had a black stove in her kitchen fireplace. This was fired by coke, which you could see burning menacingly and white-hot behind a small glass porthole at the front. On the top of the stove there was a flat, disc-shaped lid which could be prised open with a specially-shaped handle. All manner of combustible rubbish - like biscuit wrappers or old magazines - could be dropped into the stove to be swallowed by the flames.

Bottles were returned to the milkman, washed and sparkling glacially in the wire basket next to the front door, along with an order for the next day. Jars were kept for the jam-making season - and for keeping the nails, screws and safety-pins that were hoarded meticulously by my grandfather on an old Singer sewing-machine table out in the side 'verandah' (- the space outside the kitchen door which was roofed with corrugated plastic). Any other kind of bottle was despatched back to the 'Outdoor' down the road, where its deposit was returned.

Newspapers were for kindling; old sheets cut up for dusters; old knitwear unravelled and buttons returned to the button-jar. Food was never wasted, although bacon rind would be left out for the birds. On a Monday, the week's washing would be done by the end of the morning and hanging out to dry; or if it was wet, the washing would be hanging from a clothes dolly above the table in the kitchen. I remember the damp and yet comforting smell of the clothes drying; she must have ironed everything with her small electric iron which had no steam jet, as mine does.

The only seat of chaos in this house was a small cloakroom, next to the front door and under the stairs. A small, cobwebbed and dusty leaded window let a milky light into the closet, which was full of mildewed raincoats, stiff forgotten boots and musty boxes of things that I would love to be able to explore now. Apart from this one dark, neglected and unloved corner - which always made me feel sad, even as a toddler - the house was always immaculate.

And for all its spotless, domestic perfection, it wasn't a happy house. My grandparents were invariably at utter odds with each other, having married each other perhaps for the wrong reasons. They were both, in their own way, incredible grandparents to me and I still love them very much.

And I suppose I'd rather have a hectic and happy house. But oh, how I wish I'd inherited my grandmother's ability to keep it tidy - just sometimes!

The illustration above is by Hilary Knight, reproduced from Peg Bracken's 1963 domestic tome entitled, "The I Hate to Housekeep Book"