From Windrush To The Big Top: The Trunks That Carried My Life

I’ve earned my living with things that outlast moods. Sometimes I think a trunk can teach a wall to listen. When I lift the lid, I’m calling time back from smoke. Pier to parade, the rope is spliced but strong. I found another trunk in those years, and my ears rang like a tent pole in wind. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded. It refused to be a flourish. It felt like a voice from a lost world. Far from simple wood and hardware, but a fragment of the travelling circus.

Sometimes the metal box meets the painted wood. Both knew waiting. I read the scratches like scripture. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they settle the air. That’s how history breathes: in grain. These days I see trunks in Shoreditch windows. Stack them three high beside a sofa. Some call it vintage, but I call it earned. A trunk keeps its place in the room. If you step into a shop and see one, don’t laugh at the dent. Take retro home storage the box that understands time, and watch it stand another fifty years.

The room holds the hush before the music. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, silent as a drum just before lights-up. Every dent and scrape whisper of muddy fields and midnight load-outs. You can almost feel the rush before the ringmaster’s call. Then another chapter found me. Once a year the tents rose overnight and changed the air, and handbills pasted to brick and lampposts boasted elephants, fire eaters, trapeze artists, and clowns.

Anticipation walked ahead of the drums. Wagons rattled the kerbs, and a tang of rope and canvas drifted everywhere. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic. So I keep both trunks, and I go about my day. Old paint softens. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if asking when the tents go up again. And when the buses moan along the road like slow whales, 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.

And then a new mirror landed in my lap. A digital print crossed my path, and it showed a clown suitcase storage trunk that matched mine. The sight of it turned a key in the dark. The tilt of the face, the paint bleeding into the grain all felt uncanny. I imagined the same trunk crossing two lives. Poster to panel, glare to patina: the echo landed in the same room. People now call trunks storage, but they carried lives before cheap plastic. They were made to survive knocks and weather.