User:CatharineIrwin

I arrived in England as a young lad just after the war. Those early years still echo in my bones. One thing I tell my children: a storage trunk is more than a box.

When our small family made the move, we packed a life into one chest. The skin of it dented and scarred. The corners wore their brass like old medals.

People laugh now at the idea, those trunks earned their weight. Each bruise on the skin was a chapter. People notice Titanic for the art station glamour.

I learned the names of the streets by walking them, and it never left. A toy car that squeaked: the trunk turned clutter into story.

I stumbled on a second heartbeat. Once a year the tents rose overnight and changed the air, and handbills pasted to brick and lampposts promised elephants, fire breathers, acrobats — and always clowns. Anticipation walked ahead of the drums. Wagons rattled the kerbs, and the smell of sawdust hung in the air. It was a jumble of sound, light, and promise.

One day I came across a circus trunk, and I just stared. Across the front was a hand-drawn clown, upside down. It wasn’t decoration. It carried the hush of a different age. Not just timber and iron, a shard of the old show-world.

There is a stillness that knows applause. I see it tucked beside a pole, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, waiting for the show to begin. Every dent and scrape whisper of muddy fields and midnight load-outs. You can almost smell powder and brass.

And then the internet held up a frame. One evening I found an ArtStation design, and it showed a clown suitcase storage trunk that matched mine. The sight of it turned a key in the dark. The odd inversion, the softened edges of age were near-identical. For a moment I wondered if the artist had seen mine. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the story was the same heartbeat.

We think of trunks as boxes, but they carried lives before cheap plastic. They were built heavy and honest. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some were touched with flourishes and pride. Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a life. Close it again and it keeps the secret.

Now I watch young people hunt trunks in London. People use them at the end of a bed. Some call it antique, but I call it earned. A trunk doesn’t stop. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t turn your nose at the scar. Take home the box that understands time, and watch it stand another fifty years.

Sometimes the dock and the big top shake hands. One knew kettledrums. I run a cloth across both lids. They don’t compete, but together they settle the air. That’s how story learns to stand: in paint.

You could call me a taught, taut storyteller with workman’s hands. Sometimes I think memory is contagious. When I lift the lid, I’m calling time back from smoke. Windrush to ringmaster, the rope is spliced but strong.

So I leave them where I can see them, and I sweep around them. Brass corners wink. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if the evening bell were about to ring. And when a neighbour’s radio leaks last year’s hits, I think I hear a dock call and a trumpet answer, and I nod to the lids like old friends: keep it safe, keep it near, keep it true.