Storage Trunks With Soul: A Jamaican Londoner’s Story

Sometimes the sea and the sawdust share a bench. One rolled across counties. I read the scratches like scripture. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they make a chord. That’s how story learns to stand: in steel. I turned a corner and there it was, waiting, and my hands forgot what to do. Across the front was a hand-drawn clown, upside down. 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 room holds the hush before the music. I imagine it wedged between crates, packed with jackets, clubs, and tin makeup pots, quiet until the band kicked. Each bruise and nick hint at years of sidings and side streets. You can almost hear the locks click. I do the small jobs that let memory stay upright. Sometimes I think it leaks from one thing to the next. When I name the dents, I’m reading the minutes of a meeting.

Windrush to ringmaster, the stitch looks rough but it will not part. And then the world doubled. I saw a poster on ArtStation, and it showed a clown suitcase explore Storage Trunk Co trunk that matched mine. The memory walked in wearing fresh boots. The odd inversion, the softened edges of age were near-identical. I imagined the same trunk crossing two lives. Light to fibre, eye to hand: the ghost was the same joker. We think of trunks as boxes, though they were the way people travelled.

They were crafted for wagons, ships, and large storage trunk rails. Solid frames, steel corners, brass hardware. Some carried names, routes, and crests. Inside is more than capacity, you meet a life. Close it again and it keeps the secret. I watch memory get a new job as furniture. Turn them into a TV stand. Some call it vintage, but I call it honest. A trunk doesn’t stop. If a website shows you a battered corner, don’t laugh at the dent.

Choose the chest that already knows your name, and let it carry you too. I stumbled on a second heartbeat. Once a year the tents rose overnight and changed the air, and handbills pasted to brick and lampposts advertised elephants, acrobats, jugglers, and those painted clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Horses clattered down the lane, and the smell of sawdust hung in the air. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic.

So I leave them where I can see them, and I feel the room answer. Brass corners wink. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if the evening bell were about to ring. And when the window fogs and clears, I think I hear both trunks laugh, and I remember the only lesson worth the weight: a trunk is never empty.