Wednesdays are especially hectic for me, as I have to clean the house for two hours before my cleaner arrives. With that pre-blitz session and then three hours of finding places to work (cafes, libraries, sometimes the attic) – well, the day is very full. I’m aware that dropping the c-bomb is an incendiary act. One of the aspects of trying to “have it all” as a modern feminist blowhard is that another woman ends up lint-rollering cat hair off your sofa and harshly judging your slapdash method of Q-tip disposal. I hired my first cleaner 10 years ago, when I realised that I was only ever two back-to-back deadlines away from living in Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible. What I needed, I realised, sadly, was a wife. I said this many times to my former husband, although I’m not certain he ever got the gist. I meant that, as I worked harder and harder, there was no 1950s-style, fragrant wife-type magically decrumbing the patch around the toaster, or noticing that the vegetable tray in the fridge had flooded.

What I settled for, though it pained me, was a cleaner who could come in and notice these things, and restore life roughly to factory settings. And here I am, a decade later, grateful as hell, stacking everything into piles beforehand and bleaching the toilet bowl myself, and still fearing the key in the door.

A painful attitude to domestic help is, I think, a fundamental aspect of being working class made good. Obviously, many will feel that having a cleaner means I can’t talk about being working class with a straight face. I would argue that due to a childhood full of risible 80s working-class NHS dentistry, I can’t do very much at all with a straight face, especially not eat a Granny Smith apple. But, more pressingly, it’s during my emotional tangles with “staff” – cough – that my true beginnings are writ large.

When I was small, my mother worked, among other things, as a cleaner, sloshing a mop over shop floors, with me sitting, sometimes, on the counter. Her female ancestors only made the jump from working on farms in the Cumberland hills to the big city of Carlisle by signing up for a long life of “service” in posh houses.

All the same, in the early 1980s, I saw the middle-class life of Ria in the sitcom Butterflies and thought it fantastic: her big house in Cheltenham, a park romance with a man called Leonard and, importantly, her deadpan cleaner Ruby, who loitered omnipresently with a bucket and a tube of BBC prop-department Vim. Ruby, the cleaner, fitted seamlessly into Ria’s world, acting as a home-help, sounding board, mother and marriage-guidance counsellor. Their exchange of cold hard cash for elbow grease appeared seamless.

In comparison, I hide on cleaning days, lurking in a nearby cafe, fretting that I could have at least pre-loaded the dishwasher; worrying that the Turin shroud face imprints I leave on pillowcases after every spray tan mark me out, in my mother’s words, as “a dirty slut”. Incidentally, this phrase used to mean something quite different up north in the 1970s. Being a slut in 2019 is seen as empowering, because you get to bang constantly, and even march down the road in your thong railing against “shaming”. At one point, however, “a slut” described a woman who didn’t wash her net curtains. A slut was the type who would hide in a cafe and let another woman fold her knickers. It does not feel so good to be this type of slut.

My mother found my jump to hiring my own cleaner semi-outrageous. Brass-necked, even. This was not the natural order. Neither will she hear of help herself, although she is in her 80s. Because what would people say? She softened a bit to my “London life” eventually. If I was determined to have a career – and I don’t make life easy for myself, do I? – at least someone would, once a week, chuck out an old vase of flowers and pour the putrid water down the sink. Someone might defuzz my blinds and sort my teaspoons. Someone could do the stuff she would do, had I not fled the north.

My cleaner’s mother, who doesn’t live in London, probably worries about who is looking after her so far away. Maybe she wonders who is doing her mopping, if she is so busy doing mine. All of the above things flood my mind every Wednesday as I flee the sound of my own vacuum cleaner. My kitchen surfaces have never been less smeary, but my conscience remains besmirched.