Down The Pub: A Cockney Tale Of Old Storage Trunks

Sometimes I set the Windrush trunk beside the circus trunk. One knew kettledrums. I run a cloth across both lids. They don’t compete, but together they hum low. That’s how history breathes: shop antique chest in the patience of a latch. I stumbled on a chest that carried the show inside it, and the world thinned for a moment. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded. It wasn’t decoration. It carried the hush of a different age.

Far from simple wood and hardware, a splinter of that wandering life. There is a quiet that understands timing. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, 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. So I let them live in my rooms, and I sweep around them. Old paint softens. And every time I pass, the upside-down clown catches my eye, as if the evening bell were about to ring.

And when the kettle rattles and the light slants just so, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I repeat the truth one more time: a trunk holds a life. We think of trunks as boxes, but they carried lives before cheap plastic. They were made to survive knocks and weather. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some were touched with flourishes and pride. Inside is more than capacity, you meet a timeline with edges.

Close it again and it keeps the secret. I’ve earned my living with things that outlast moods. Sometimes I think it leaks from one thing to the next. When I trace the paint, I’m taking attendance. Pier to parade, the seam holds and flexes. And then a new mirror landed in my lap. One evening I found an ArtStation design, and it showed a clown suitcase home storage solutions 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 were near-identical. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the echo landed in the same room. Time circled back with a different mask. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and bright bills slapped onto old brick promised elephants, fire breathers, acrobats — and always clowns.

The feeling arrived days before the wagons. Crews shouted across the field, and the smell of sawdust hung in the air. It was a jumble of sound, light, and promise. I see steel boxes forgiven into coffee tables. Hide vinyl and blankets and winter coats. Some call it vintage, but I call it still beating.