WHEN businesswoman Sarah Southworth looks back on the woman she was 20 years ago, she feels sorry for her.

Her partner became depressed and committed suicide leaving her with two sons, aged three and four.

She had no family or friends around to help, she couldn’t drive and her only means of survival was working horrific hours as a packer with a neighbour babysitting the kids.

Something had to give and it had to be the job. So she started taking in ironing at £3 an hour working from 5.30am until 10 at night. The lady who ran the ironing round eventually sold it to Sarah for £100, a sum she had to borrow. But she made £130 on her first day.

“I worked 17 hours a day and I wore a patch in the carpet where I stood,” said the multi-award winning businessowner who now lives in Samlesbury.

“I can’t look back to the time of my partner’s death because it was so upsetting. I feel sorry for the woman I was then because I struggled like hell. I was exhausted but I had to get on with it, for the sake of the kids.”

Sarah got a breakthrough in 2003 when she was offered work for a housing association cleaning houses after people had been evicted or had died.

Today she runs the highly successful Specialised Cleaning Services company, based in Preston, and employs 20 men.

Sarah, 45, who has won several inspiring women and business awards, said: “It fascinates me how people live. We don’t realise the state some people can live in.

“It really is horrendous when you see how an elderly lady or gentleman may live on their own. You think ‘oh my God, how the hell do you live like this?’ It’s heartbreaking really. I do genuinely care about people, and if I think I can help somebody I will. It really gets to me when I get a really bad case.

“It’s the nature of the job that we are faced with gruesome scenes and the human side of things really hits home.

“The worst job I’ve ever done was when a lady a similar age to myself had died in her bed in the front room of her flat, and she’d been deceased for weeks. No-one had found her and her body had begun to decompose causing fluids to seep through the ceiling below and drip into the bottom flat, which is the only reason she was found.

“That gets to me because there’s no community spirit – she lived in an upstairs flat, how had that poor woman been dead for weeks and her neighbours hadn’t even noticed? It’s so sad.”

Sarah said she cannot clean as many houses in a day as she once did, simply because they are dirtier. “At one time I’d drive over 200 miles in a day and still have five properties to clean, but I couldn’t do it now. People don’t seem to care any more and the states in which they leave their houses is unbelievable.”

One job which particularly upset her was at a house in Preston. The kitchen floor was covered with dog faeces with only a tiny square in the corner where the dog had been lying.

“The sad thing is that there was a sign on the window saying ‘a dog is for life not just Christmas”, but that poor dog who lived in that kitchen had had no life at all. You do acquire a strong stomach, but one of the things that I really don’t like is if someone has left without flushing the toilet. I can’t stand that smell of urine.

“Cleaning is looked down on, but it doesn’t bother me, I’m a trained professional and I’m really proud of what I do and I absolutely love my job.

“People are surprised to see me as a woman, and I do drive a three-and-a-half ton tipper, so I get a few funny looks.

“They say: ‘What a strange job for a woman to be doing.’ I never say I’m the boss, but the lads like to tell them: ‘Yeah, it’s her first day, she’s doing all right’. But I always get a lot of respect from them and I never ask them to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. We always have a laugh – you have to in this job.”