Steel Across The Sea Sawdust Across The Field: How Two Trunks Spoke To Me
I stumbled on a second heartbeat. Once a year the tents rose overnight and changed the air, and bright bills slapped onto old brick advertised elephants, acrobats, jugglers, and those painted clowns. Anticipation walked ahead of the drums. Wagons rattled the kerbs, buy storage trunk and the smell of sawdust hung in the air. It was a jumble of sound, light, and promise.
I spot travel chests in Hackney lofts and Mayfair halls. Stack them three high beside a sofa. Some call it vintage, but I call it honest. A best storage trunk catches breath. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t turn your nose at the scar. Pick the trunk with a story, and let it start speaking in your rooms.
We treat trunks like containers, though they were the way people travelled. They were crafted for wagons, ships, and rails. Solid frames, steel corners, brass hardware. Some were touched with flourishes and pride. Inside is more than capacity, you meet a life. Latch it and it holds the temperature of memory.
And then a new mirror landed in my lap. A digital print crossed my path, and the image mirrored my clown chest. The sight of it turned a key in the dark. The odd inversion, the softened edges of age all felt uncanny. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the ghost was the same joker.
Sometimes the metal box meets the painted wood. Both knew waiting. I oil the hinges and listen. They don’t compete, but together they settle the air. That’s how story learns to stand: in the patience of a latch.
One day I came across a circus trunk, and my ears rang like a tent pole in wind. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded. 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.
There is a stillness that knows applause. I see it tucked beside a pole, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, silent as a drum just before lights-up. Each bruise and nick hint at years of sidings and side streets. You can almost feel the rush before the ringmaster’s call.
I fix, I mend, I carry, I keep. Sometimes I think it infects a room until every shadow hums. When I name the dents, I’m reading the minutes of a meeting. Tilbury to tightrope, the rope is spliced but strong.
So I keep both trunks, and I feel the room answer. Metal warms. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if asking when the tents go up again. And when a neighbour’s radio leaks last year’s hits, I think I hear both trunks laugh, and I nod to the lids like old friends: keep it safe, keep it near, keep it true.