An Old Cockney Remembers His Trunk

I see steel boxes forgiven into coffee tables. Hide vinyl and blankets and winter coats. Some call it antique, but I call it honest. A large storage trunk catches breath. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t turn your nose at the scar. Choose the chest that already knows your name, and let it carry you too. Sometimes the dock and the big top shake hands. One rolled across counties. I count the screws and thank the hands.

They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they settle the air. That’s how story learns to stand: in paint. So I keep both trunks, and I set a cup of tea nearby. Old paint softens. Each time I walk by, that inverted grin finds me, as if waiting for the drumroll. And when I can smell rain in old mortar, I think I hear a dock call and a trumpet answer, and I nod to the lids like old friends: keep it safe, keep it near, keep it true. Years later, another memory took hold.

Once a year the tents rose overnight and changed the air, and bright bills slapped onto old brick boasted elephants, fire eaters, trapeze artists, and clowns. The feeling arrived days before the wagons. Crews shouted across the field, and the smell of sawdust hung in the air. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic. We think of trunks as boxes, though they were the way people travelled. They were made to survive knocks and weather.

Timber sides, iron straps, vintage trunk deep latches. Some were touched with flourishes and pride. Open one and you don’t just see space, you meet a life. Set it down and the floor remembers too. And then the world doubled. A digital print crossed my path, and the image mirrored my clown chest. The sight of it turned a key in the dark. The odd inversion, the softened edges of age all felt uncanny. For a moment I wondered if the artist had seen mine.

Poster to panel, glare to patina: the story was the same heartbeat. There is a quiet that understands timing. I imagine it wedged between crates, stuffed with costumes and props, waiting for the show to begin. Each bruise and nick suggest roads and rain and rough travel. You can almost feel the rush before the ringmaster’s call. I stumbled on a chest that carried the show inside it, and my hands forgot what to do.

A clown stared back, vintage trunk inverted and bold, grin part-faded. It wasn’t decoration. It read like a signature from a vanished road. Not a lifeless box, a splinter of that wandering life.