Janitor, janitor, where is your mop?
Janitor, janitor, where is your mop?
Janitor, janitor, where is your mop?
For Christ’s sake, let the question drop!

Janitor, janitor, where is your pail?
You have no pail and you have no mop.
You have no bucket, you have no keys.
Oh please please let this matter drop!

These are the first two verses of Janitor, Janitor, one of the songs collected in the new compendium Four Hundred And Forty-Four Songs About Janitors And Janissaries, edited by Dennis Beerpint. It is a work of majestic scholarship, and Beerpint is to be congratulated for the depth of his scholarship, the rigour of his method, the pernicketyness of his annotations, the suavity of his commentary, the glamour of his bouffant, the schmaltz of his windpipery, the electrocution of his swan, the guzzling of his wren pie, the redundancy of his courage, the consistency of his porridge, and the tess of his durbevilles. What he is most certainly not to be congratulated for is that creaking malignant awful dehydrated boney boney trapeze artiste air he simultaneously exudes and muffles, muffles and exudes, all spat-out fruit-pips and prisoner’s dilemma, a mole in the headlights of a tractor, a tractor in a field, a field in Merrie England where rustics cavort around a maypole before slumping exhausted on to bales of hay and straw, picking gorse and bracken out of their hair, while in the blue blue skies above, dirigibles loom like so many gas-filled balloons above the verdant splendour.

It is a verdant splendour many of the janitors in this magnificent anthology would do well to revisit, could they but drag themselves away for five minutes from their interminable corridors, punctuated by cupboards, where keys are rattled, and buckets and pails and mops are mislaid, and there is terrible weeping in the dark hours before the dawn.