Durban Harbour, 1937 · No sign-up required
The steamliner arrived at Durban Port sometime in the late 1930s, which is how Samuel Thomas Isaac Hughes — known as ST — brought his two daughters to South Africa for the first time. He had accompanied them from England. Daphne was young. Peggy was younger. And neither of them had ever seen a port quite like Durban.
In those days, passengers disembarking at Durban were required to leave their shoes on the dock before coming ashore. Nobody is entirely sure why. It was simply the rule — shoes off, lined up on the dock, collected again once you had cleared the port. Hundreds of pairs, side by side in the African sun.
Somewhere on that dock, Daphne and Peggy found a tin of yellow paint.
What happened next created quite an uproar. By the time anyone noticed, the shoes were done. Every pair. Bright, particular, impossible yellow. Two hundred pairs of shoes, painted on a Durban dock by a fourteen-year-old and her younger sister while their father was somewhere inside arguing about paperwork.
ST came out to find a dock full of yellow shoes and a harbour official who had very firm opinions about this sort of thing. He looked at Daphne. He looked at Peggy. He looked at the shoes.
Then he laughed. A long, helpless, deeply inconvenient laugh — the kind that makes things considerably worse with harbour officials.
The shoes were repainted. Mostly. The harbour official was pacified. Eventually. And ST Hughes stood on that Durban dock with paint on his hands and tears of laughter still drying on his face, and he looked at his daughters and said something that Daphne never forgot.
She never told DuGallan exactly what it was. She said it was just for her.
But she painted her front door yellow for the rest of her life.
Every house. Every flat. Every room she ever lived in that had a door she could paint. Yellow — that particular, impossible yellow from a Durban dock in 1937. Nobody who visited ever asked why. It simply felt right. It felt like a decision made a long time ago that had never needed revisiting.
ST Hughes disappeared into the Belgian Congo sometime in the late 1930s. He left behind a trail of clues — a partial map, a pressed orange flower, a note in his handwriting, and four letters sent to Daphne over the years that followed. Each one ended the same way.
Not yet. Wait.
He never came home. The yellow door was always there when he might have.
The Hughes Chronicles is based on a true family story. ST Hughes was real. Daphne was real. The trail is real. The locations are rooted in real history. Where the story needed wings to fly — it was given them. The mystery at its heart has never been solved.
The yellow paint on the Durban dock was not random. ST Hughes painted yellow wherever he went — doors, gateposts, markers. A habit, a signal, a trail. Start where the horses ran.
This really happened. Read The True Story of ST Hughes →
A grandfather on the West Coast of South Africa. A grandchild in London. Both looking at the same page on a video call, arguing about where ST went and why he left the clues he did.
One purchase. One flipbook. One shared screen. The trail runs between generations — exactly the way ST intended it to.
More on reading together across the miles →
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