What on earth does a woman do to stop herself going mad in the days after discovering her husband is a paedophile?
Lynsey Crombie says that some women ‘might go to a yoga retreat’ to calm the swirling horror in their heads, but it’s unlikely, ‘since the shame makes you afraid to leave the house’.
In her case, reaching for the gin was out of the question, too, since she was 28 weeks pregnant with twins when her husband was arrested. Instead, she grabbed the bleach.
‘Pure bleach,’ she says. ‘I remember pouring it all over the work surfaces, and over my own hands and arms and I scrubbed. I scrubbed everything – myself included – with a scourer. I remember thinking that this man had touched me physically and I want all his germs to go.
‘I still remember the fumes and how I felt afterwards – not good. It was a coping mechanism rather than normal behaviour, but when you are married to a paedophile…’
And expecting his children? This might have been over 20 years ago now, but she can still vividly remember the horror of that one. ‘I thought “I can’t do this. I can’t have his children”,’ she admits.
But it was too late for that. She went into premature labour within days of that 5am knock on the door by the police.
‘And thank goodness that when my girls arrived I looked at them and felt nothing but love. They actually saved me because I had to rebuild my life for them. I don’t think I’d be here without them.’
Lynsey Crombie, the Queen of Clean, discovered her then-husband’s paedophilia 20 years ago
She is now one of the UK’s longest-reigning cleaning influencers, even pre-dating Mrs Hinch
Lynsey – better known as The Queen of Clean – is one of the UK’s longest-reigning cleaning influencers. Now 46, she first came to public consciousness on the Channel 4 show Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners in 2013, but her career really took off when she started posting cleaning content on social media, pre-dating even Mrs Hinch.
She’s a formidable force with just under one million loyal followers on social media, her own range of cleaning products, four hit books and a regular slot on This Morning.
When we meet, her followers are half-way through a January de-clutter challenge, trying to be a little more Lynsey themselves.
Her life does seem, on social media anyway, all lovely and lemony. She is tall, blonde and pristine, with skirting boards to match, but she’s one of the toughest cookies you could meet, a survivor of skin cancer, diagnosed two years ago.
Her empire was built on pain, incredible determination and – quite literally – the desire to wash that man, and everything he represented, out of her life.
Indeed, she credits cleaning not just for her success, but for her sanity. Her mission? To equip other women with the tools to carry on through the very worst.
When she says that her twins Mollie and Olivia had ‘a terrible start in life’, it’s hard to disagree.
They both weighed under 3 lb when they were born, having to be flown to Edinburgh to a special-care unit because there were none available in Newcastle, where Lynsey was living. She was left penniless and moved in to her parents’ spare room – complete with oxygen tank for Mollie, who was particularly poorly – for the first weeks of their lives.
Lynsey turned to cleaning in the aftermath of the revelations, using it as a coping mechanism
She came to public consciousness with her Channel 4 show Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners
When she started to rebuild her life she took a string of jobs, including one cleaning job that involved scrubbing toilets in a care home. ‘I hadn’t got anything,’ she says. ‘Friends were buying me bags of shopping because I couldn’t afford a can of tuna.’ Many of the old-school cleaning tips she’d one day be known for came from these care-home residents.
Her girls are now 22 and have given their blessing for her to do this interview, clearly agreeing with their mum ‘that it’s important to speak out and say to other women “you can survive this”.’
Thankfully, she says, they look nothing like their biological father (‘they are both mini mes’), and every day she also thanks God that her ex – whom she asks us not to name for their protection (‘I call him The Freak’) – is not in their lives. ‘Dad’ to them has been Rob, her second husband, whom she married when her daughters were two, and with whom she has a teenage son, Jake.
‘I’m quite lucky, actually, because he [her sex offender ex] never wanted to be in their lives. He never requested any access. Some women do have to deal with that. He’s actually back in prison now,’ she tells me. ‘He got two years last year, it’s the third or fourth time he’s been in. This time they found content of children and animals on his computer. It’s disgusting, isn’t it?’
A friend gave her the heads up that her ex’s vile crimes were all over the local pages on ‘bloody Facebook’ but one daughter had got there first.
‘She said, “Mum is this my real dad?”, so we had to have that conversation, but to be honest I’ve never hidden anything from them. They’ve known from when they were about nine. There is a box of letters in the loft from when he wrote to me from prison, and we’ve been through it.’
Were those letters full of regret and apology, evidence of a man determined to make amends? ‘No, they were short – one side of A4 – very basic “I’m in prison”, and were more about him and what he was doing. They were full of self-pity.’
Lynsey was born in Twickenham, London, the daughter of a gas fitter and a housewife, and always yearned for a neat sort of life. She can’t quite pinpoint when her cleaning obsession started, but she was the sort of kid who asked for toy vacuum cleaners for Christmas.
There was no career plan built around mops, however. She worked in marketing after school and saw herself as a career girl.
But at 23 she was swept off her feet by a man her mum hated (‘she called him Catalogue Man’). He was an executive for a major entertainment company, handsome, rich – or so she thought.
‘I discovered later that the big car was on credit. He was up to his eyeballs in debt. He’d even bought my wedding dress on credit. I was having to pay it off years later when he was prison.’
On her wedding day to that ‘vile man’, her soon-to-be sister-in-law took her aside and asked if Lynsey knew that her fiance had been to prison. It was rather late to be asking that question, but Lynsey said she did. He had told her that he’d served time after he got in a fight. ‘I said something about boys being boys. [His sister] didn’t say anything more. She just walked off.’
Had Lynsey known that prison spell was for sex offences, she would have ‘run a mile’ – and it still leaves her incredulous that her ex’s family didn’t tell her.
‘Because they all knew. When he was arrested, my mother-in-law said, “Oh, not again”.’
How can a woman not know they are married to a deviant? It’s a question Lynsey has asked herself over and over again, and she can see now there were signs.
She talks of getting up in the small hours to find her husband absent from bed, ‘and in his office, at the computer’. Several times she remembers going in ‘and him actually pulling the plug from the wall, not just shutting down the computer’.
While she now knows what he was doing, of course she had no idea then. After all, what wife, in those circumstances, would immediately think ‘paedophile’? A hidden affair or a secret gambling habit would seem more likely.
And, as Lynsey says: ‘I was in my early 20s. I was a baby.’
She was also busy trying to have a child. There were three miscarriages in quick succession, which left her distraught. (‘I still think that was the universe’s way of trying to say to me “do not have his children”.’) Imagine her delight then when she got pregnant – and with twins.
Life did indeed seem perfect, until the police arrived on the doorstep ‘banging and banging’, taking her husband – and all the unspeakable content on his devices – away. She won’t go into what he had done, suffice to say ‘it was Category A stuff, the worst’.
Not that she knew any details at the time. ‘The thing is, the police don’t tell you anything. They said they couldn’t.’ It was left to her in-laws to fill in the gaps. She remembers being hysterical, literally lashing out.
‘I’m not proud of this because she was an old woman even then, and I don’t know if she’s even still alive, but I slapped his mother across the face as hard as I could. I said, “you knew”.’
So many lives shattered by one man. There is an element of sympathy for her in-laws (who were the ones to get graffiti daubed on their walls) but all contact with them ceased.
‘It’s so sad. I find it weird that they didn’t ever try to get in touch, because they had two granddaughters. My daughters have cousins they don’t know. I think we could have managed a relationship, eventually. Once I’d calmed down and grown up, it would have been OK.’
At first, she tried to keep the arrest secret, not even telling her own parents. ‘It wasn’t long after Ian Huntley had murdered those two girls [Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, Cambridgeshire], and people around him had been involved too, and I just remember thinking that everyone would think I was like that as well. And when I went into labour, the girls just became the focus.’
This was survival at its most basic. Olivia was in hospital for six weeks; Mollie for eight. It was touch and go for her. They had been discharged, Lynsey recalls, by the time she called her parents, and unleashed the truth.
‘And I’ll never forget this. I was watching Holby City so it must have been late in the evening, but somehow at that time my dad managed to hire a van and he just arrived at my house at 1am. He said, “You are coming home”.
‘My parents were brilliant. They took over, set me up with a flat. I barely had a pound to my name.’ So began the rebuilding, the slog to juggle part-time jobs cleaning and working in bars.
One of the most upsetting things was how her ex’s crimes put the whole family on the radar of child protection services for years to come.
‘I’d open the door to find social services there, and I felt they were watching me,’ she says.
She also feels that the ‘system’ is designed to assume – if not expect – that a wife will stay with her husband in these situations.
‘I remember going to a women’s group. There were eight of us, in the same position, and six had chosen to stay with the man. I was thinking, “what planet are you on?”
‘I know I was lucky because I’d only been with him for a couple of years. I didn’t have 20 years of history, and some women feel they can’t survive in the world alone, but imagine having a birthday party with six-year-olds running around, knowing your husband is a paedophile.’
But she was in the minority. ‘I feel social services encourage you to stay with the man because then the wife can watch and make sure they aren’t re-offending.’
Is there enough support for women in that position? ‘No, I don’t think there is. It’s still taboo to even talk about it.’ Eventually, she became a GP receptionist, where she met Rob, a medical rep.
Her first text to him said: ‘I’m going through a divorce, my ex is a paedophile and I have two kids. Still interested?’
He was. But she was not a trusting wife, second time around. Once, she marched Rob to a police station to check he wasn’t on any register she should know about. Her questions about what he was doing on his phone were incessant. ‘But he stayed,’ she smiles. ‘He’s the calm one, whereas I always have to be doing something.’
Mostly cleaning, obviously, or writing about cleaning.
She reckons her entrepreneurial zeal saved her as much as motherhood did. ‘My marketing background was important,’ she concedes. ‘That’s why I fear for young influencers who come into this bubble without that sort of real-world background.’
It was a combination of fluke and chutzpah that got her on Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners. She was working on a local magazine and happened to answer the phone to a Channel 4 employee who wanted to place an ad to recruit cleaning nuts. ‘That’s me,’ she said.
A new brand was born when a friend made her a pink apron emblazoned with Lynsey: Queen of Clean – but it was Lynsey’s determination to build on this exposure that really set her apart.
‘There were eight of us on that show, but I was the only one who said, “right, this is a platform and I’m going to use it”. There was another girl on there who could have been huge, but she didn’t have a business brain.’
Crucial here was the timing. Lynsey initially joined Instagram because her twins were on there (‘because of what happened I was always monitoring what they were looking at online’), but in 2016 a random picture of her clean kitchen floor sent her ‘likes’ skyward. She posted more cleaning content, adding tips.
Within six months her follower count had leapt into the thousands, brand partnerships began and she became recognised as one of the first ‘cleanfluencers’ – wooed by the big brands to promote their products.
She recalls an early campaign endorsing a plug hole unblocker. One of her children took the photo, she uploaded it, and received £6,000. One of her biggest contracts was for £75,000.
It’s hard to pinpoint when she realised that her money worries were over. Buying her own house was a highlight. As was heading to Bond Street to buy a Gucci handbag for one of her daughters – although she’s annoyed that she got trolled for that, labelled as one of those glossy Instagrammers who don’t live in the real world.
‘I treated her and yes it was extravagant, but I get sick of people saying I’ve been handed all this on a plate. We’ve had nothing. I remember taking the girls to Pontins on a £40 holiday because it was all we could afford. It was so dirty I put the sheets from the bed on the floor so they could play.
‘They’ve seen me slog, and if I want to treat them, I will.’
What about healing yourself, though? Lynsey tells me there was a point after the paedophile revelations where she ‘didn’t want to live’.
She did see a counsellor, briefly, but found more helpful ‘therapy’ in just ‘doing basic stuff like getting outside, moving, doing stuff’. And cleaning, obviously. It always comes back to cleaning.
While today’s new generation of TikTok cleanfluencers have tried to claim the concept of cleaning-as-therapy as their own, she blazed the trail.
‘People used to laugh at me when I said it was my therapy, but it always was, and I still think that when you have anxiety, when you can’t get out of the house, it’s better to clean than to fester.’
Her message, in a spray bottle, is this: life can always be made to sparkle.
‘When people say to me that they want to end their lives or whatever, I always say, “no, please don’t say that” because we can all come out of this, and not just survive but thrive.’
The 15-Minute Clean by Lynsey Crombie (Welbeck, £14.99) Follow Lynsey at @lynsey_queenofclean and queenofclean.blog
