Down The Pub: A Cockney Tale Of Old Storage Trunks

Sometimes I set the Windrush trunk beside the circus trunk. One knew kettledrums. I count the screws and thank the hands. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they hum low. That’s how history breathes: in the patience of a latch. We treat trunks like containers, but they carried lives before cheap plastic. They were built heavy and honest. Timber sides, unique vintage décor iron straps, deep latches.

Some wore brass corners or painted letters. Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a life. Latch it and it holds the temperature of memory. I watch memory get a new job as furniture. Turn them into a TV stand. Some call it distressed, 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 turn your nose at the scar. Pick the trunk with a story, and watch it stand another fifty years. The past turned its head and grinned.

Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and the posters glued to walls boasted elephants, fire eaters, trapeze artists, and clowns. Anticipation walked ahead of the drums. Horses clattered down the lane, and a tang of rope and canvas drifted everywhere. It felt like ordinary life had slipped a gear. And then the world doubled. One evening I found an ArtStation design, and it showed a clown suitcase storage trunk that matched mine. For a heartbeat I was two people in two rooms.

The tilt of the face, the paint bleeding into the grain matched line for line. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood. Light to fibre, eye to hand: the echo landed in the same room. So I leave them where I can see them, wooden storage trunk and I sweep around them. Pigment quiets. Each time I walk by, that inverted grin finds me, as if the evening bell were about to ring. And when the buses moan along the road like slow whales, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I remember the only lesson worth the weight: a trunk is never empty.

The room holds the hush before the music. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, packed with jackets, clubs, and tin makeup pots, quiet until the band kicked. Each bruise and nick suggest roads and rain and rough travel. You can almost smell powder and brass. I found another trunk in those years, best storage trunk and the world thinned for a moment. Across the front was a hand-drawn clown, upside down. It refused to be a flourish.

It felt like a voice from a lost world. Not a lifeless box, a splinter of that wandering life.