An Old Cockney Remembers His Trunk

And then the internet held up a frame. I saw a poster on ArtStation, and the image mirrored my clown chest. The memory walked in wearing fresh boots. The skew of the grin, the way colour sank into wood matched line for line. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood. Poster to panel, glare to patina: the echo landed in the same room. I’ve earned my living with things that outlast moods.

Sometimes I think a best storage trunk can teach a wall to listen. When I name the dents, I’m reading the minutes of a meeting. Windrush to ringmaster, the stitch looks rough but it will not part. We treat trunks like containers, but they carried lives before cheap plastic. They were built heavy and honest. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some carried names, routes, and crests. Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a life. Close it again and it keeps the secret.

There is a stillness that knows applause. I imagine it wedged between crates, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, waiting for the show to begin. All the scuffs on the hinges whisper of muddy fields and midnight load-outs. You can almost hear the locks click. So I leave them where I can see them, and I go about my day. Brass corners wink. And every time I pass, the upside-down clown catches my eye, as if waiting for the drumroll.

And when the kettle rattles and the light slants just so, 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. Time circled back with a different mask. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and bright bills slapped onto old brick promised elephants, fire breathers, acrobats — and always clowns. Anticipation walked ahead of the drums.

Wagons rattled the kerbs, and a tang of rope and canvas drifted everywhere. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic. I stumbled on a chest that carried the show inside it, and I just stared. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded. It refused to be a flourish. It read like a signature from a vanished road. Not just timber and iron, a splinter of that wandering life. I watch memory get a new job as furniture. Hide vinyl and blankets and winter coats.

Some call it distressed, but I call it honest. A trunk catches breath. If a website shows you a battered corner, don’t laugh at the dent. Choose the chest that already knows your name, and watch it stand another fifty years.