Down The Pub: A Cockney Tale Of Old Storage Trunks

I met a trunk that smelled faintly of greasepaint, and the world thinned for a moment. Across the front was a hand-drawn clown, upside down. It refused to be a flourish. It read like a signature from a vanished road. Not just timber and iron, but a fragment of the travelling circus. People now call trunks large storage trunk (Gtanet said in a blog post), 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. Open one and you don’t just see space, you meet a journey.

Close it again and it keeps the secret. Time circled back with a different mask. The circus came to town once a year, 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 large storage trunk the smell of sawdust hung in the air. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic. And then the internet held up a frame.

A digital print crossed my path, and it showed a clown suitcase storage trunk that matched mine. When I saw this poster on ArtStation of this clown suitcase storage, it took me back. This is exactly the same storage trunk that I had.. The skew of the grin, the way colour sank into wood all felt uncanny. I imagined the same trunk crossing two lives. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the story was the same heartbeat. Now I watch young people hunt trunks in London. Hide vinyl and blankets and winter coats.

Some call it vintage, but I call it earned. A trunk catches breath. If you step into a shop and see one, don’t call it junk. Take home the box that understands time, and let it start speaking in your rooms. The room holds the hush before the music. I imagine it wedged between crates, packed with jackets, clubs, and tin makeup pots, waiting for the show to begin. Every dent and scrape hint at years of sidings and side streets. You can almost hear the locks click.

I fix, I mend, I carry, I keep. Sometimes I think it infects a room until every shadow hums. When I tell this tale, it isn’t nostalgia for its own sake. Ship to wagon, the stitch looks rough but it will not part. Sometimes the dock and the big top shake hands. Both knew waiting. I read the scratches like scripture. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they hum low. That’s how story learns to stand: in the patience of a latch.

So I leave them where I can see them, and I feel the room answer. Brass corners wink. And every time I pass, the upside-down clown catches my eye, as if the evening bell were about to ring. And when the window fogs and clears, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I repeat the truth one more time: a trunk holds a life.