A real man, a real disappearance, and a mystery that has never been solved — the true story behind every book in the Hughes Chronicles.
Every book in the Hughes Chronicles begins with the same understanding: ST Hughes was a real man, and almost everything that happens to him in these pages either happened, or is the family's best honest guess at what did.
ST Hughes left Wales for South Africa in the 1920s — alone, as far as anyone knows, with nothing but a trunk and an eye for horses that was as much a Welsh inheritance as a South African opportunity. (Read more about that journey in Welsh Immigrants in South Africa in the 1920s.) He made his way to the Orange Free State, where that eye for horses found him work on the farms that bred racehorses for the tracks at Bloemfontein and Johannesburg. In time, he had land of his own — a farm the family would come to call Shannon — and a wife, Amelia.
Two daughters were born at Shannon: Daphne, and her younger sister Peggy. It was around this period, too, that ST created what the family still calls Black Forest Tea — a remedy of his own devising, with its own complications and its own unanswered questions, which we'll come to in a piece of its own.
At some point before 1940, the family travelled back to Britain — to Wales, and to England — for a time. Exactly why has become part of the larger story DuGallan is still piecing together. What's certain is how they came back.
The ship docked at Durban in 1937, and — as was the custom — every passenger left their shoes on the dock before going ashore. ST went inside to deal with the port paperwork, leaving Daphne, fourteen, and Peggy, younger, waiting outside. Somewhere on that dock, the two of them found a tin of yellow paint.
By the time anyone noticed, it was done. Every pair. Two hundred pairs of shoes, painted a bright, particular, impossible yellow, by a fourteen-year-old and her younger sister, while their father argued about paperwork twenty feet away. ST came out to a dock full of yellow shoes and a harbour official with very firm opinions about the matter. 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.
Maybe that's where it started. Or maybe yellow had always meant something to ST, and his daughters simply gave it permission to mean something to everyone — because from that point on, yellow runs through this family's whole story: a door on a farmhouse in Wales, a marker scratched into a windowsill in Johannesburg, a colour that turns up, again and again, exactly where someone needed to leave a sign.
After the family returned to Shannon, ST travelled to the Belgian Congo. Why, exactly, has never been entirely clear — though every book in this series takes its own run at the question. What is certain is that he didn't come back. No body was found. No explanation was ever confirmed. ST Hughes simply stopped being reachable — and for the family he left behind, that was the beginning of a silence that has now lasted nearly ninety years.
Daphne was still a girl when her father disappeared. The Durban dock — with its absurd sea of yellow shoes — remained one of the last ordinary family memories anyone had of him. She spent much of the rest of her life trying to find out what had happened, following every clue ST had left behind, deliberately or otherwise. She never found ST. But she found almost everything else — and when she died in 2019, at ninety-three, she left that trail, and the search, to her son: DuGallan.
The Hughes Chronicles is that search, continued. Every clue in the books — the maps, the letters, the yellow markers — is drawn from something real Daphne actually found. The central question, what happened to ST Hughes in the Congo, is asked honestly in these books because it has never been answered honestly anywhere else. It still hasn't been answered. That's not a plot device. It's the truth the whole series is built on.