User:VirgieGoshorn

I came to London as a boy in ’48. Windrush days make a mark that never fades. One lesson stuck hard: a trunk carries a life inside it.

When we come across the water, all we owned fit a single trunk. It was cold steel outside. The handles bit my palms with a worker’s truth.

In the age of plastic, memory is cheap, those trunks came ready for distance. Every scratch was a mile. Those scenes were true, not costume.

I made a small home in Brixton, and it never left. A church programme folded neat: the trunk kept them safe when the room leaked.

I stumbled on a second heartbeat. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and the posters glued to walls advertised elephants, acrobats, jugglers, and those painted clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Wagons rattled the kerbs, and the smell of sawdust hung in the air. It was a jumble of sound, light, and promise.

I found another trunk in those years, and the floor under me felt like boards on a wagon. Painted on the panel, a clown face eclipsed by time. It wasn’t decoration. It carried the hush of a different age. Not a lifeless box, a splinter of that wandering life.

There is a stillness that knows applause. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, stuffed with costumes and props, 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 a screen repeated the past. A digital print crossed my path, and the design looked eerily like that same trunk. The memory walked in wearing fresh boots. The odd inversion, the softened edges of age matched line for line. I imagined the same trunk crossing two lives. Light to fibre, eye to hand: the story was the same heartbeat.

People now call trunks buy storage trunk, though they were the way people travelled. They were made to survive knocks and weather. Thick boards, stout hinges, stubborn locks. Some wore brass corners or painted letters. Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a timeline with edges. Latch it and it holds the temperature of memory.

I see steel boxes forgiven into coffee tables. People use them at the end of a bed. Some call it retro, but I call it still beating. A trunk keeps its place in the room. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t call it junk. Take home the box that understands time, and let it start speaking in your rooms.

Sometimes the sea and the sawdust share a bench. One knew fog horns. I run a cloth across both lids. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they settle the air. That’s how story learns to stand: in steel.

You could call me a taught, taut storyteller with workman’s hands. Sometimes I think memory is contagious. When I name the dents, I’m reading the minutes of a meeting. Ship to wagon, the rope is spliced but strong.

So I leave them where I can see them, and I feel the room answer. Metal warms. Each time I walk by, that inverted grin finds me, as if waiting for the drumroll. And when the buses moan along the road like slow whales, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I repeat the truth one more time: a trunk holds a life.