by Stella Kaye

Created on: April 17, 2008   Last Updated: March 30, 2009

A CLEAN SWEEP: Chapter One: An Unlikely Alliance.

Henrietta Jones, the cleaning lady, decided she had reached the end of her tether; it was time to make a few sweeping changes in her life. For more years than she cared to remember she had dutifully dusted the family home, tolerated an increasingly ungrateful husband (who had eventually left her for a younger woman with smoother hands) and had nurtured her two children to maturity.

Now her idle offspring were reluctant to leave. "Perhaps it's your own fault," friends would say with just a hint of irony, "you've looked after them far too well!"

Henrietta had a variety of cleaning jobs to fill the week as well as her own housework but at least she was paid well and would receive quite a tidy sum in her Christmas box each year owing to the amount of employers she had on her round. But as for any real appreciation, she received little more from them than from her own family.

Take Mr. Bolton for instance, an eccentric and as yet unpublished author. He would bash merrily away on an antiquated typewriter while Henrietta attempted to manoeuvre the vacuum cleaner between unwieldy piles of books and papers stacked in unlikely and sometimes dangerous places throughout his property. New stacks would spring up like mushrooms practically overnight and one day some even appeared in the bath. "It's only a temporary measure," he had assured her, quite some time ago.

"Why don't you buy some stacking units from that trendy new Ikea place?" Henrietta had suggested, helpfully. "I'm sure all your books would fit in nicely and you'd have far more space."

But her advice went unheeded. Cleaning Mr. Bolton's house was far from easy and if one solitary item was moved just an inch from its original setting he would boom at her in a loud, stentorian voice: "Order! What I must have above all else is order!" But it seemed very much like chaos to Henrietta's way of thinking. Then there were the Hamlyn's, a larger-than-life, single-parent family crammed into a tiny, tumbledown town house. Mr. Hamlyn, locally known as the Pied Piper, though he couldn't quite figure out why, was an incorrigible but hopeless D I Y enthusiast. His house shared too many similarities with the one that Jack had built, for Henrietta's liking. Nothing ever worked and if by some strange quirk of fate it did, then it wasn't for very long. She was always relieved when her two-hour cleaning stint was over, pleased that no badly-mounted fixtures or fittings had come crashing

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