An Old Cockney Remembers His Trunk

You can say I kept a career of remembering. Sometimes I think it leaks from one thing to the next. When I lift the lid, I’m calling time back from smoke. Windrush to ringmaster, the stitch looks rough but it will not part. Sometimes I set the Windrush trunk beside the circus trunk. One knew fog horns. I let my knuckles knock, soft as prayer. They don’t compete, but together they hum low. That’s how memory moves: in paint.

One day I came across a circus trunk, and my ears rang like a tent pole in wind. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded. It wasn’t decoration. It carried the hush of a different age. Not a lifeless box, but a fragment of the travelling circus. So I leave them where I can see them, and I feel the room answer. Old paint softens. And every time I pass, the upside-down clown catches my eye, as if waiting for the drumroll.

And when the window fogs and clears, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I nod to the lids like old friends: keep it safe, keep it near, keep it true. The old workshop where I keep it still hums. 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 hear the locks click. Years later, another memory took hold.

Once a year the tents rose overnight and changed the air, and bright bills slapped onto old brick boasted elephants, wooden storage trunk fire eaters, trapeze artists, and clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Horses clattered down the lane, and everything smelled of canvas, rope, and damp grass. It felt like ordinary life had slipped a gear. These days I see trunks in Shoreditch windows. Keep letters and stones and private grins. 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 call it junk. Choose the chest that already knows your name, and let it start speaking in your rooms. And then the world doubled. A digital print crossed my path, and the design looked eerily like that same trunk. It felt like a new stitch pulling old cloth. 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 story was the same heartbeat.

People now call trunks decorative storage box, though they were the way people travelled. They were crafted for wagons, ships, and rails. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some wore brass corners or painted letters. Inside is more than capacity, you meet a life. Set it down and the floor remembers too.