User:HGSScarlett

From Beasts of Bermuda
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I came to London as a boy in ’48. The sea beat a drum I still hear. One fact I learned the rough way: those old trunks are memory made solid.

On the voyage that bent time in half, everything we were sat under that lid. It was cold steel outside. The lid smelled of oil and salt.

It’s easy to miss the point, those trunks knew how to keep going. Every scratch was a mile. People notice Titanic for the glamour.

Brixton took my first winters and taught me patience, and it sat through summers and rent rises. Photographs, certificates, little papers: the trunk swallowed them all without complaint.

Time circled back with a different mask. The circus came to town once a year, and bright bills slapped onto old brick boasted elephants, fire eaters, trapeze artists, and clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Crews shouted across the field, and the smell of sawdust hung in the air. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic.

I met a trunk that smelled faintly of greasepaint, and my hands forgot what to do. Painted on the panel, a clown face eclipsed by time. It refused to be a flourish. It carried the hush of a different age. Far from simple wood and hardware, a shard of the old show-world.

My workspace smells of oil, wood, and patient repairs. I imagine it wedged between crates, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, storage trunk waiting for the show to begin. All the scuffs on the hinges whisper of muddy fields and midnight load-outs. You can almost hear the locks click.

And then the world doubled. A digital print crossed my path, and the design looked eerily like that same trunk. The sight of it turned a key in the dark. The skew of the grin, the way colour sank into wood all felt uncanny. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood. Poster to panel, glare to patina: the echo landed in the same room.

We think of trunks as boxes, yet once they moved whole families. They were crafted for wagons, ships, and rails. Solid frames, steel corners, brass hardware. Some carried names, routes, and crests. Open one and you don’t just see space, you meet a timeline with edges. Close it again and it keeps the secret.

Now I watch young people hunt trunks in London. People use them at the end of a bed. Some call it antique, but I call it still beating. A trunk doesn’t stop. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t laugh at the dent. Choose the chest that already knows your name, and watch it stand another fifty years.

Sometimes I set the Windrush trunk beside the circus trunk. One rolled across counties. I run a cloth across both lids. They don’t compete, but together they make a chord. That’s how memory moves: in weight.

You can say I kept a career of remembering. Sometimes I think a lid can hold a season. When I speak on trunks, I’m not selling romance. Windrush to ringmaster, the seam holds and flexes.

So I let them live in my rooms, and I sweep around them. Timber settles. And every time I pass, the upside-down clown catches my eye, as if asking when the tents go up again. And when I can smell rain in old mortar, I think I hear a dock call and a trumpet answer, and I remember the only lesson worth the weight: a trunk is never empty.

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