User:Karissa0234

Mi name Varon, been in London since 1948. Windrush days make a mark that never fades. One thing I tell my children: a travel trunk keeps a family’s story folded under its lid.

On the voyage that bent time in half, one steel-sided trunk was suitcase, wardrobe, archive. The skin of it dented and scarred. The lid smelled of oil and salt.

Some folks don’t understand, but those trunks were built for storms. Every dent was a port. But look at the docks, the stacks of trunks.

I made a small home in Brixton, and it never left. A church programme folded neat: the trunk kept them safe when the room leaked.

I stumbled on a second heartbeat. Once a year the tents rose overnight and changed the air, and handbills pasted to brick and lampposts advertised elephants, acrobats, jugglers, and those painted clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Wagons rattled the kerbs, and the smell of sawdust hung in the air. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic.

I turned a corner and there it was, waiting, and I just stared. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded. It was more than paint. It felt like a voice from a lost world. Not just timber and iron, a splinter of that wandering life.

The old workshop where I keep it still hums. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, packed with jackets, clubs, and tin makeup pots, silent as a drum just before lights-up. Each bruise and nick suggest roads and rain and rough travel. You can almost feel the rush before the ringmaster’s call.

And then a pixel waved to grain. 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 skew of the grin, the way colour sank into wood matched line for line. For a moment I wondered if the artist had seen mine. Poster to panel, glare to patina: the story was the same heartbeat.

We treat trunks like containers, though they were the way people travelled. They were built heavy and honest. Thick boards, stout hinges, stubborn locks. Some were touched with flourishes and pride. Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a life. Set it down and the floor remembers too.

Now I watch young people hunt trunks in London. Turn them into a TV stand. Some call it retro, but I call it honest. A trunk keeps its place in the room. If a website shows you a battered corner, don’t turn your nose at the scar. Pick the trunk with a story, and watch it stand another fifty years.

Sometimes the sea and the sawdust share a bench. Both knew waiting. I let my knuckles knock, soft as prayer. They don’t compete, but together they make a chord. That’s how story learns to stand: in the patience of a latch.

I do the small jobs that let memory stay upright. Sometimes I think a lid can hold a season. When I trace the paint, I’m taking attendance. Tilbury to tightrope, the rope is spliced but strong.

So I leave them where I can see them, and I talk to them without speaking. Pigment quiets. And every time I pass, the upside-down clown catches my eye, as if asking when the tents go up again. And when the window fogs and clears, I think I hear both trunks laugh, and I nod to the lids like old friends: keep it safe, keep it near, keep it true.

My blog - art station