Down The Pub: A Cockney Tale Of Old Storage Trunks

You could call me a taught, taut storyteller with workman’s hands. Sometimes I think a trunk can teach a wall to listen. When I trace the paint, I’m taking attendance. Pier to parade, the line is not broken. So I keep both trunks, and I sweep around them. Timber settles. And every time I pass, the upside-down clown catches my eye, as if waiting for the drumroll. And when I can smell rain in old mortar, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I remember the only lesson worth the weight: a trunk is never empty.

I stumbled on a second heartbeat. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and bright bills slapped onto old brick advertised elephants, acrobats, jugglers, and those painted clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Wagons rattled the kerbs, and a tang of rope and canvas drifted everywhere. It felt like ordinary life had slipped a gear. I found another trunk in those years, and my hands forgot what to do. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded.

It wasn’t decoration. It felt like a voice from a lost world. Far from simple wood and hardware, but a fragment of the travelling circus. The old workshop where I keep it still hums. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, packed with jackets, clubs, and tin makeup pots, waiting for the show to begin. Each bruise and nick hint at years of sidings and side streets. You can almost hear the locks click. Sometimes two lives sit shoulder to shoulder on my floor.

One came across oceans. I read the scratches like scripture. They don’t compete, but together they make a chord. That’s how story learns to stand: in paint. 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. The memory walked in wearing fresh boots. The tilt of the face, the paint bleeding into the grain were near-identical. For a moment I wondered if the artist had seen mine. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the ghost was the same joker.

We treat trunks like containers, though they were the way people travelled. They were crafted for wagons, ships, and rails. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some were touched with flourishes and shop antique chest pride. 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 vintage, but I call it still beating. A trunk doesn’t stop.