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

Sometimes the dock and the big top shake hands. One knew fog horns. I count the screws and thank the hands. They don’t compete, but together they make a chord. That’s how story learns to stand: in grain. You could call me a taught, taut storyteller with workman’s hands. Sometimes I think a trunk can teach a wall to listen. When I speak on trunks, I’m not selling romance. Pier to parade, the seam holds and flexes. I found another trunk in those years, and my ears rang like a tent pole in wind.

Painted on the panel, a clown face eclipsed by time. It refused to be a flourish. It read like a signature from a vanished road. Far from simple wood and hardware, a shard of the old show-world. Time circled back with a different mask. The circus came to town once a year, and bright bills slapped onto old brick promised elephants, fire breathers, acrobats — and always clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Crews shouted across the field, and the smell of sawdust hung in the air.

It was a jumble of sound, light, and promise. People now call trunks storage, yet once they moved whole families. They were crafted for wagons, large storage trunk ships, and rails. Solid frames, steel corners, brass hardware. Some wore brass corners or painted letters. Inside is more than capacity, you meet a journey. Latch it and it holds the temperature of memory. And then a pixel waved to grain. I saw a poster on ArtStation, and the image mirrored my clown chest.

The sight of it turned a key in the dark. The skew of the grin, the way colour sank into wood matched line for line. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood. Poster to panel, glare to patina: the echo landed in the same room. Now I watch young people hunt trunks in London. People use them at the end of a bed. Some call it replica antique storage, but I call it still beating. A trunk keeps its place in the room. If a website shows you a battered corner, don’t call it junk.

Take home the box that understands time, and let it carry you too. The old workshop where I keep it still hums. I see it tucked beside a pole, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, waiting for the show to begin. Every dent and scrape suggest roads and rain and rough travel. You can almost feel the rush before the ringmaster’s call. So I keep both trunks, and I feel the room answer. Pigment quiets. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if the evening bell were about to ring.

And when a neighbour’s radio leaks last year’s hits, I think I hear a dock call and a trumpet answer, and buy storage trunk I remember the only lesson worth the weight: a trunk is never empty.