EGUAgustin

London became home after a long ship from Jamaica. Those early years still echo in my bones. One fact I learned the rough way: a trunk carries a life inside it.

On that long crossing from Jamaica to England, one steel-sided trunk was suitcase, wardrobe, archive. The skin of it dented and scarred. The lid smelled of oil and salt.

It’s easy to miss the point, but those trunks were built for storms. Every scratch was a mile. Watch old films and you’ll see it.

I learned the shopkeepers by their voices, and it waited like an old friend. Photographs, certificates, little papers: the trunk hid them when I needed quiet.

Then another chapter found me. Every year the circus rolled in like a quick storm, and bright bills slapped onto old brick promised elephants, fire breathers, acrobats — and always clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Wagons rattled the kerbs, and the smell of sawdust hung in the air. It felt like ordinary life had slipped a gear.

I found another trunk in those years, and I just stared. A clown stared back, inverted and bold, grin part-faded. It refused to be a flourish. It felt like a voice from a lost world. Not just timber and iron, a shard of the old show-world.

There is a quiet that understands timing. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, crammed with shoes, wigs, and greasepaint, silent as a drum just before lights-up. Every dent and scrape whisper of muddy fields and midnight load-outs. You can almost smell powder and brass.

And then a pixel waved to grain. A digital print crossed my path, and smithers of stamford it showed a clown suitcase storage trunk that matched mine. For a heartbeat I was two people in two rooms. The odd inversion, the softened edges of age were near-identical. For a moment I wondered if the artist had seen mine. Light to fibre, eye to hand: the story was the same heartbeat.

We treat trunks like containers, yet once they moved whole families. They were made to survive knocks and weather. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some were touched with flourishes and pride. Inside is more than capacity, you meet a journey. Set it down and the floor remembers too.

I watch memory get a new job as furniture. Keep letters and stones and private grins. Some call it antique, but I call it earned. A trunk keeps its place in the room. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t laugh at the dent. Take home the box that understands time, and let it carry you too.

Sometimes two lives sit shoulder to shoulder on my floor. One knew fog horns. I let my knuckles knock, soft as prayer. They don’t compete, but together they settle the air. That’s how memory moves: in paint.

I’ve earned my living with things that outlast moods. Sometimes I think it infects a room until every shadow hums. When I trace the paint, I’m taking attendance. Tilbury to tightrope, the line is not broken.

So I let them live in my rooms, and smithers of stamford I set a cup of tea nearby. Brass corners wink. Each time I walk by, that inverted grin finds me, as if asking when the tents go up again. And when a neighbour’s radio leaks last year’s hits, I think I hear my trunk breathe, and I repeat the truth one more time: a trunk holds a life.

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