June Harkness

Age

seventy-four

Role

Retired postmistress; the town’s unofficial archivist

At the Post Office

1968 to 2011

Where to find her

the Reading Room, weekday afternoons

June Harkness ran the Morrowfen Post Office for forty-three years. She retired in 2011. She is the town’s unofficial archivist, in the sense that she remembers everything and tells you only what she has decided you should know.

On the parish

June was born in Morrowfen, lived elsewhere twice (Aingersby, briefly, in the early 1960s; Norwich, for a year, in the 1980s), and returned. She has been, at various times, postmistress, school governor, parish councillor, and secretary of the Drainage Day committee. She keeps the small museum cabinet in the Reading Room.

On the post office

The post office closed in 2014. June’s project, which she has been quietly pressing for several years, is to reopen the building as a museum. The Council is, on this matter, lukewarm.

The Post Office and Reading Room are profiled at Places.