From Windrush To The Big Top: The Trunks That Carried My Life
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. Crews shouted across the field, and a tang of rope and canvas drifted everywhere. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic. So I let them live in my rooms, and I sweep around them. Pigment quiets. Whenever I glance over, the clown looks back, as if asking when the tents go up again.
And when I can smell rain in old mortar, 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. 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 read like a signature from a vanished road. Not just timber and iron, but a fragment of the travelling circus. Sometimes two lives sit shoulder to shoulder on my floor.
One rolled across counties. I oil the hinges and listen. They don’t compete, but together they settle the air. That’s how story learns to stand: in grain. These days I see trunks in Shoreditch windows. Turn them into a TV stand. Some call it retro, but I call it earned. A trunk keeps its place in the room. If a website shows you a battered corner, don’t call it junk. Pick the trunk with a story, and let it carry you too. There is a quiet that understands timing.
I imagine it wedged between crates, stuffed with costumes and props, waiting for the show to begin. All the scuffs on the hinges hint at years of sidings and side streets. You can almost smell powder and brass. I do the small jobs that let memory stay upright. Sometimes I think a lid can hold a season. When I trace the paint, I’m taking attendance. Windrush to ringmaster, the stitch looks rough but it will not part.
We think of trunks as boxes, but they carried lives before cheap vintage trunk plastic. They were made to survive knocks and weather. Thick boards, stout hinges, stubborn locks. Some were touched with flourishes and pride. Inside is more than capacity, you meet a journey. Latch it and it holds the temperature of memory. And then a pixel waved to grain. I saw a poster on ArtStation, and the image mirrored my clown chest. It felt like a new stitch pulling old cloth. The skew of the grin, the way colour sank into wood were near-identical.
I imagined the same trunk crossing two lives. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the ghost was the same joker.