Unannounced, up a ladder, with a bucket and a piece of leather. Here are ten.
1. He Arrived Without Warning
There was no appointment, no card through the door and no phone call. A ladder appeared against the front of the house and somebody was at the bedroom window.
The interval was roughly every few weeks and never exactly predictable, which meant the household was permanently in a state of mild unreadiness about it.
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2. The Ladder Came Off the Van, or Off His Shoulder
Either a van with a long ladder strapped to a roof rack, or a man carrying the whole thing on one shoulder from house to house down the street.
It was extended by hand, footed against the path, leant against the brickwork and climbed, and that was the entirety of the safety arrangement.
3. The Equipment Was a Bucket and a Piece of Leather
Water, a little detergent, a cloth or brush to wash, and then a chamois leather wrung out almost dry to take the water off and leave nothing behind.
The leather is the whole technique. It holds a great deal of water, releases it when wrung, and leaves no lint, and a good one was looked after for years.
4. The Squeegee Arrived Later
The rubber blade drawn across the glass in one continuous stroke came into general domestic use well after the leather, and the two coexisted for a long time.
Watching somebody clear an entire pane in one unbroken movement without stopping is one of those small displays of competence that is impossible to look away from.
5. You Carried On as Though Nobody Was There
The household convention was absolute. Whatever you were doing continued, you did not acknowledge the person two feet away on the other side of the glass, and neither did they.
It was the most elaborate piece of mutual pretence that occurred in a normal week, and everybody on both sides of the window understood the rules perfectly.
6. Which Was Completely Impossible
Because they were two feet away, upstairs, at eye level, in a room you were in. Children in particular could not manage it and spent the entire visit staring.
Adults achieved it by looking very hard at something else, and the moment of accidental eye contact through wet glass was mortifying out of all proportion.
7. There Was a Shout
At the end, from the path, up at the house or in through an open door, announcing that he had finished. Not a knock on the door first, a shout.
Everybody in the street knew that voice and roughly when to expect it, and it functioned as a more reliable timepiece than anything in the house.
8. You Could See Exactly How Far He Had Got
Half the windows in the street clean and half of them not, which meant anybody could tell precisely where he was in the round and how long until he reached them.
Which also meant that any house he had skipped was visible from the pavement, and everybody knew which houses those were and why.
9. He Knew More About the Street Than Anybody
Somebody who looks in through every upstairs window of forty houses every few weeks, for twenty years, accumulates an extraordinary amount of information.
The remarkable thing, which almost everybody who remembers one will confirm, is how little of it ever went anywhere. Discretion was the actual product.
10. Then It All Went to Poles
The ladder has largely gone, replaced by a telescopic pole fed with purified water from a tank in a van, used from the ground, which dries without marks and needs no drying off.
It is safer, faster and better, and nobody is at the window any more. The one thing the pole cannot do is shout up the stairs that it has finished.
A Ladder, a Leather and an Elaborate Pretence
An arrival nobody could predict, a ladder footed against the path, a chamois wrung almost dry, a household convention of total mutual non-acknowledgement, and a shout from the path that told the whole street the time.
The fifth and sixth items together are the thing everybody recognises. Both sides had agreed to behave as though a man standing at an upstairs window two feet away was not there – and neither side could actually do it, which is why the accidental glance through the wet glass is the part people remember most clearly.
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