Poem: ‘A Statue of Innocence, or Geological Time in the Department’
Alan Brownjohn, 2 September 1982
(for John Betjeman)
Miss Frith was put on processing; that glue And all those labels. Not seven months there, And Mr Mortimer, who always said ‘Miss Frith’ and never ‘Gill’ or ‘Gillian’, Right through the informal Nineteen-Sixties, Rested one day his two hands on her hips As she sat cross-legged on the high stool At the labelling desk. She did not squirm,...