User:AdelaidaBirtwist

|I came to London as a boy in ’48. The sea beat a drum I still hear. One lesson stuck hard: a travel trunk keeps a family’s story folded under its lid.

When the ship finally slid into Tilbury, everything we were sat under that lid. Belgium steel rolled strong and stubborn. The lid smelled of oil and salt.

In the age of plastic, memory is cheap, those trunks came ready for distance. Each bruise on the skin was a chapter. Look at the queues of families with their lives in boxes.

I kept my trunk in the corner like a low drum, and it never left. A church programme folded neat: the trunk hid them when I needed quiet.

Years later, another memory took hold. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and handbills pasted to brick and metal storage trunk lampposts advertised elephants, acrobats, jugglers, and those painted clowns. Anticipation walked ahead of the drums. Horses clattered down the lane, and the smell of sawdust hung in the air. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic.

I met a trunk that smelled faintly of greasepaint, and my hands forgot what to do. Across the front was a hand-drawn clown, upside down. It was more than paint. It felt like a voice from a lost world. Not a lifeless box, a splinter of that wandering life.

My workspace smells of oil, wood, and patient repairs. I imagine it wedged between crates, stuffed with costumes and props, silent as a drum just before lights-up. All the scuffs on the hinges whisper of muddy fields and midnight load-outs. You can almost feel the rush before the ringmaster’s call.

And then a new mirror landed in my lap. 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 matched line for line. For a moment I wondered if the artist had seen mine. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the story was the same heartbeat.

People now call trunks large storage trunk, but they carried lives before cheap plastic. They were crafted for wagons, ships, and rails. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some wore brass corners or painted letters. Open one and you don’t just see space, you meet a journey. Latch it and it holds the temperature of memory.

Now I watch young people hunt trunks in London. Hide vinyl and blankets and winter coats. Some call it distressed, but I call it earned. A trunk doesn’t stop. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t laugh at the dent. Pick the trunk with a story, and let it carry you too.

Sometimes I set the Windrush trunk beside the circus trunk. One knew fog horns. I read the scratches like scripture. They don’t compete, but together they make a chord. That’s how story learns to stand: in steel.

I’ve earned my living with things that outlast moods. Sometimes I think memory is contagious. When I lift the lid, I’m calling time back from smoke. Tilbury to tightrope, the line is not broken.

So I leave them where I can see them, and I feel the room answer. Timber settles. And every time I pass, the upside-down clown catches my eye, as if the evening bell were about to ring. And when I can smell rain in old mortar, I think I hear both trunks laugh, and I repeat the truth one more time: buy storage trunk a trunk holds a life.