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Alba Curtin
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About me
I came to London as a boy in ’48. Those early years still echo in my bones.
One thing I tell my children: those old trunks are memory made solid.
When the ship finally slid into Tilbury, all we owned fit a
single trunk. Belgium steel rolled strong and stubborn. The corners wore their brass like
old medals.
People laugh now at the idea, those trunks had backbone.
Every dent was a port. People notice Titanic for the glamour.
I learned the shopkeepers by their voices, and it stayed with me.
A toy car that squeaked: the trunk swallowed them all
without complaint.
Then another chapter found me. Once a year the tents rose overnight and changed the air, and bright bills slapped onto old brick boasted elephants,
fire eaters, trapeze artists, and clowns. Anticipation walked ahead of the drums.
Wagons rattled the kerbs, and everything smelled of canvas,
rope, and damp grass. It felt like ordinary life had
slipped a gear.
I found another trunk in those years, and my hands forgot what
to do. Across the front was a hand-drawn clown, upside down. It refused
to be a flourish. It read like a signature from a vanished road.
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, packed with
jackets, clubs, and tin makeup pots, quiet until the band kicked.
Each bruise and nick hint at years of sidings and side streets.
You can almost feel the rush before the ringmaster’s call.
And then a new mirror landed in my lap. I saw a poster on ArtStation,
and it showed a clown suitcase storage trunk that matched mine.
The memory walked in wearing fresh boots.
The skew of the grin, the way colour sank into wood
matched line for line. For a moment I wondered if the artist
had seen mine. Light to fibre, eye to hand: the echo landed in the same room.
People now call trunks storage, but they carried
lives before cheap plastic. They were built heavy and
honest. Timber sides, iron straps, deep latches. Some wore brass corners or painted letters.
Lift the lid and you meet a story, you meet a timeline with edges.
Set it down and cheap vintage trunk the floor remembers too.
I watch memory get a new job as furniture.
Hide vinyl and blankets and winter coats. Some call it distressed, but I call it still beating.
A trunk catches breath. If a website shows you a battered corner, don’t laugh at
the dent. Take home the box that understands time, and let
it carry you too.
Sometimes the sea and the sawdust share a bench.
One knew fog horns. I run a cloth across both lids. They don’t argue,
but together they hum low. That’s how history breathes: in steel.
You can say I kept a career of remembering. Sometimes I think memory is contagious.
When I tell this tale, it isn’t nostalgia for its own sake.
Tilbury to tightrope, the stitch looks rough
but it will not part.
So I let them live in my rooms, and I talk to them without speaking.
Pigment quiets. And every time I pass, the upside-down clown catches my eye, as if asking when the tents go up again.
And when the kettle rattles and the light slants just so, I think I
hear my trunk breathe, and I nod to the lids like old friends:
keep it safe, keep it near, shop antique chest keep it true.
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May 13th 2026, 3:59 pm
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May 13th 2026, 3:59 pm 
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