Well, I was contemplating disclosing this however I learned that the person who owned this carpet has now passed away.

However, I won’t disclose names or addresses.

Back in 2009, I received a phone call to view a carpet in Penketh, Warrington. Yes, 13 years now.

On arriving at the property I was shown the carpet.

It was just black, full of food, sticky residue, quite frankly my first thoughts were just binned it. It was not cost-effective to clean

The son of the property said he wanted it cleaned no matter what the cost, which led to the reason why he needed it cleaned.

In 1966 his mum and dad lived in what was then called Rhodesia.

Dad was a civil engineer and they worked in Rhodesia for 6 years.

When leaving to return home they had the carpet made from scratch and the cost then was 600 English pounds, as a memory of their time there. It was returned to the Uk along with animal skins.

The carpet was fitted in the kitchen diner area of the house where it has sat ever since.

The mum died in 1990, at which time dad started to drink heavily, and was a major cause for the state of the carpets.

To cut a long story short I did a sample area, a few inches square.

Nothing in my arsenal would do anything. The carpet stayed the same, nothing lifted

I concluded that I would need to send sample fibers away as I did not recognise them, and none of my chemicals had any effect on them.

The fibre was sent away to the chemist I used, who returned with the answer.

The fibres are made from camel hair. Never come across this before, even when we were training.

So a call was put in the Ncca for some guidance.

And the response was were not sure, have you tried?

Were at a loss too.

I returned a call to the chemist and asked if he could do some testing for me.

After a few days, the call came in. A chemical had been found which they believe could clean the carpet.

A sample was sent to me to clean, enough to clean an area of 5 square inches.

The process was to agitate the area with a nylon brush and to spray the chemical on as with any other carpet cleaning process.

Leave for 10 minutes and agitate the area, and reapply more of the chemical.

Flush the area using just cold water until the area was clean, and then use a hairdryer to speed the drying process up.

The time to clean this little area was twenty minutes.

I clean a flight of stairs at that time.

The area of the carpet was 22ft x 13ft.

To buy the chemical to clean this area are £230.00 plus vat.

I advised the homeowner of the cost of the chemical and they said to proceed.

The chemical was ordered and three days later we returned to commence the task.

I couldn’t give the customer a price to clean as I did not have a clue how long I would be on site.

Section by section was cleaned as per the example clean. At first, it didn’t look like anything, however as the minutes and hours ticked by, a picture was emerging.

It was around 6 pm when we finally finished the cleaning.

And what was the picture?

In the centre of the carpet was a large tree, with a lion in the tree holding a gazelle in its mouth, surrounded by other wild animals?

The detail was staggering. It was like looking at a large photograph.

I knew I had done a good job when the son called his dad to take a look and he started crying.

It brought back memories of his time there with his family.

I was so chuffed at the outcome it is one of those jobs that will stay with me forever.

Most days when cleaning carpets you will forget the customer fairly quickly, but this job, never.