User:IonaBlackall
I came to London as a boy in ’48. The voyage tuned my heartbeat to the tide. One memory that refuses to loosen: a travel trunk keeps a family’s story folded under its lid.
On the voyage that bent time in half, all we owned fit a single trunk. hard like iron yet carrying soft stories inside. The latches gripped like teeth.
People laugh now at the idea, those trunks earned their weight. Each bruise on the skin was a chapter. But look at the docks, the stacks of trunks.
I learned the shopkeepers by their voices, and it held fast like a parish bell. Records, buttons, keepsakes: the trunk hid them when I needed quiet.
Years later, another memory took hold. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and handbills pasted to brick and lampposts promised elephants, fire breathers, acrobats — and always clowns. Anticipation walked ahead of the drums. Wagons rattled the kerbs, and a tang of rope and canvas drifted everywhere. It felt like ordinary life had slipped a gear.
I met a trunk that smelled faintly of greasepaint, and the floor under me felt like boards on a wagon. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded. It wasn’t decoration. It carried the hush of a different age. Not a lifeless box, a splinter of that wandering life.
The old workshop where I keep it still hums. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, silent as a drum just before lights-up. All the scuffs on the hinges whisper of muddy fields and midnight load-outs. You can almost feel the rush before the ringmaster’s call.
And then the internet held up a frame. I saw a poster on ArtStation, and the design looked eerily like that same trunk. It felt like a new stitch pulling old cloth. The tilt of the face, the paint bleeding into the grain matched line for line. I imagined the same trunk crossing two lives. Poster to panel, glare to patina: the echo landed in the same room.
People now call trunks buy storage trunk, but they carried lives before cheap plastic. They were crafted for wagons, ships, and rails. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some carried names, routes, and crests. Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a life. Set it down and the floor remembers too.
Now I watch young people hunt trunks in London. Stack them three high beside a sofa. Some call it distressed, but I call it honest. A trunk keeps its place in the room. If you step into a shop and see one, don’t laugh at the dent. Pick the trunk with a story, and let it carry you too.
Sometimes the sea and the sawdust share a bench. One knew fog horns. I count the screws and thank the hands. They don’t compete, but together they make a chord. That’s how memory moves: in grain.
I fix, I mend, I carry, I keep. Sometimes I think it infects a room until every shadow hums. When I trace the paint, I’m taking attendance. Windrush to ringmaster, the stitch looks rough but it will not part.
So I leave them where I can see them, and I go about my day. Brass corners wink. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if asking when the tents go up again. And when the buses moan along the road like slow whales, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I repeat the truth one more time: a trunk holds a life.