Storage Trunks With Soul: A Jamaican Londoner’s Story

There is a stillness that knows applause. I imagine it wedged between crates, stuffed with costumes and props, quiet until the band kicked. Every dent and scrape whisper of muddy fields and midnight load-outs. You can almost feel the rush before the ringmaster’s call. I do the small jobs that let memory stay upright. Sometimes I think a lid can hold a season. When I tell this tale, it isn’t nostalgia for its own sake. Ship to wagon, the stitch looks rough but it will not part.

So I keep both trunks, and I set a cup of tea nearby. Brass corners wink. And every time I pass, the upside-down clown catches my eye, as if waiting for the drumroll. And when the buses moan along the road like slow whales, I think I hear both trunks laugh, and I repeat the truth one more time: best storage trunk a trunk holds a life. 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 memory walked in wearing fresh boots. The skew of the grin, the way colour sank into wood all felt uncanny. For a moment I wondered if the artist had seen mine. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the echo landed in the same room. We think of trunks as boxes, though they were the way people travelled. They were crafted for wagons, ships, and rails. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some were touched with flourishes and pride.

Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a timeline with edges. Latch it and it holds the temperature of memory. Years later, another memory took hold. The circus came to town once a year, and bright bills slapped onto old brick 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 felt like ordinary life had slipped a gear.

I turned a corner and there it was, waiting, and I just stared. Painted on the panel, a clown face eclipsed by time. It wasn’t decoration. It carried the hush of a different age. Not just timber and iron, a shard of the old show-world. Now I watch young people hunt trunks in London. People use them at the end of a bed. Some call it retro, but I call it still beating. A trunk doesn’t stop. If you step into a shop and see one, don’t laugh at the dent. Choose the Rustic furniture chest that already knows your name, and watch it stand another fifty years.

Sometimes the dock and the big top shake hands. One knew kettledrums. I count the screws and thank the hands. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they make a chord. That’s how history breathes: in paint.