An Old Cockney Remembers His Trunk

And then a screen repeated the past. One evening I found an ArtStation design, and the design looked eerily like that same trunk. The memory walked in wearing fresh boots. The tilt of the face, the paint bleeding into the grain were near-identical. I imagined the same trunk crossing two lives. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the ghost was the same joker. The past turned its head and grinned. The circus came to town once a year, and the posters glued to walls boasted elephants, fire eaters, trapeze artists, and clowns.

The feeling arrived days before the wagons. Wagons rattled the kerbs, and everything smelled of canvas, rope, and damp grass. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic. One day I came across a circus trunk, and I just stared. 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. Not a lifeless box, a shard of the old show-world.

You could call me a taught, taut storyteller with workman’s hands. Sometimes I think memory is contagious. When I tell this tale, it isn’t nostalgia for its own sake. Tilbury to tightrope, the seam holds and flexes. There is a stillness that knows applause. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, packed with jackets, clubs, and tin makeup pots, silent as a drum just before lights-up. All the scuffs on the hinges suggest roads and rain and rough travel.

You can almost hear the locks click. I see steel boxes forgiven into coffee tables. Hide vinyl and blankets and winter coats. Some call it vintage trunk (click the following webpage), but I call it earned. A trunk doesn’t stop. If you step into a shop and see one, don’t turn your nose at the scar. Take home the box that understands time, and let it carry you too. We treat trunks like containers, though they were the way people travelled. They were made to survive knocks and weather.

Solid frames, steel corners, brass hardware. Some carried names, routes, and crests. Open one and you don’t just see space, you meet a timeline with edges. Latch it and it holds the temperature of memory. So I leave them where I can see them, and I talk to them without speaking. Timber settles. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if asking when the tents go up again. And when I can smell rain in old mortar, 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.