Benutzer:WolfgangBvm
I came to London as a boy in ’48. Windrush days make a mark that never fades. One fact I learned the rough way: a travel trunk keeps a family’s story folded under its lid.
When we come across the water, everything we were sat under that lid. Belgium steel rolled strong and stubborn. The lid smelled of oil and salt.
People laugh now at the idea, those trunks had backbone. Every scratch was a mile. Those scenes were true, not costume.
I made a small home in Brixton, and it stayed with me. Photographs, certificates, little papers: the trunk hid them when I needed quiet.
Then another chapter found me. The circus came to town once a year, and the posters glued to walls boasted elephants, fire eaters, trapeze artists, and clowns. You could feel it before you saw it. Wagons rattled the kerbs, and a tang of rope and canvas drifted everywhere. It was chaos and colour and a kind of magic.
I turned a corner and there it was, waiting, and the world thinned for a moment. Across the front was a hand-drawn clown, upside down. It was more than paint. It carried the hush of a different age. Not a lifeless box, a splinter of that wandering life.
There is a stillness that knows applause. I picture the trunk pushed against canvas, packed with jackets, clubs, and tin makeup pots, waiting for the show to begin. All the scuffs on the hinges hint at years of sidings and side streets. You can almost feel the rush before the ringmaster’s call.
And then a screen repeated the past. One evening I found an ArtStation design, and the design looked eerily like that same trunk. For a heartbeat I was two people in two rooms. The odd inversion, the softened edges of age matched line for line. I half-believed the artist had stood where I stood. Screen to wood, pixel to plank: the story was the same heartbeat.
We treat trunks like containers, but they carried lives before cheap plastic. They were made to survive knocks and weather. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some wore brass corners or buy storage trunk painted letters. Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a life. Latch it and it holds the temperature of memory.
These days I see trunks in Shoreditch windows. Turn them into a TV stand. Some call it vintage, but I call it honest. A trunk catches breath. If you pass a market and the lid winks, don’t turn your nose at the scar. Choose the chest that already knows your name, and let it start speaking in your rooms.
Sometimes the art station sea and the sawdust share a bench. One rolled across counties. I run a cloth across both lids. They don’t even sit in the same time, but together they settle the air. That’s how history breathes: in weight.
I’ve earned my living with things that outlast moods. Sometimes I think it leaks from one thing to the next. When I trace the paint, I’m taking attendance. Tilbury to tightrope, the rope is spliced but strong.
So I keep both trunks, and I talk to them without speaking. Timber settles. Each time I walk by, that inverted grin finds me, as if the evening bell were about to ring. And when the buses moan along the road like slow whales, I think I hear a dock call and a trumpet answer, and I nod to the lids like old friends: keep it safe, keep it near, keep it true.