Burham's Stacey Foyster takes on Samuel L. Jackson's role as the Cleaner
Published: 01:00, 16 September 2021
Updated: 07:20, 16 September 2021
Move over Samuel L. Jackson - there's a new cleaner in town.
The Hollywood actor starred as a crime-scene cleaner in the 2007 thriller Cleaner directed by Renny Harlin. But whereas Jackson's character was fictional, Burham's Stacey Foyster is the real thing.
Ms Foyster runs Cleansed Ltd, a business she started in March 2019 after quitting her job as a risk analyst for the Royal Bank of Scotland.
She said: "It may sound funny, but I really enjoy cleaning.
"I started just cleaning the home of a friend, but word spread and within a few months I had 30 clients."
Since then her business has expanded still further and she has taken on four staff to support her.
She said:"We do everything from domestic properties to businesses such as nail bars and Furniture Village."
Her firm, which she runs from her home in Burham, also cleans properties occupied by asylum seekers on behalf of Kent County Council.
But most recently, the 33-year-old mother of an eight-year-old girl, has added a new string to her bow.
She has passed her bio hazard certificate, which means her business has now been placed on the National Academy of Crime Scene Cleaners used by the police and councils.
She said: "We've attended some really nasty scenes already - several stabbings and a house where a child had died of neglect.
"Sometimes we're called in by care homes where there has been a natural incident - one case, where someone had had a stomach ulcer that burst, had resulted in blood everywhere."
In another case the firm has dealt with, a stabbing victim had moved extensively around the house before collapsing leaving a blood trail to be cleaned in almost every room.
She said: "Sometimes the blood seeps right through the carpets and the underlay, and we have to cut that patch out."
She said: "It's not a job for everyone, but you do become hardened to it. You soon learn that there's quite a lot of darkness in the world.
"It still affects me, but what I do after a particularly nasty case is make sure that I spend some time with my daughter, having fun and re-focussing on the good things."
So far, the jobs have taken her to Wales and to Gloucester where she was asked to remove around 100 needles from the home of a deceased drug addict.
She said: "The work comes from the police, from funeral directors, sometimes from families who have heard of us, sometimes from other members of the Crime Scene Academy."
Ms Foyster explained: "The bio-hazard cleans are always urgent. We offer a two-hour turnaround and I have staff ready to go at the drop of a hat. But if for some reason we can't meet that time, we pass the work to another member of the academy, and vice versa."
For details about Cleansing Ltd, visit here.
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Alan Smith