Murder at the docks

A life served in empire, ensnared by war, and buried in silence.

In 1906, in the docklands of Hong Kong, seven-year-old Enid witnessed the murder of her father.

That moment would shape the rest of her life.

Orphaned by twelve and raised in the high noon of Empire, Enid grew up amid devastating loss, brittle pretence and a way of life blind to its own impending unravelling. As war swept across the Far East, she endured the unimaginable as a civilian prisoner under Japanese occupation — emerging alive, but permanently scarred.

Her survival came at a cost.

Murder at the Docks is not simply a story of violence or war. It is a story of silence — of a woman who lived through her family’s tragedy and history’s convulsions, yet never spoke of them – and of a grandson determined to understand what trauma, sacrifice and Empire had left behind.

Spanning Far Eastern Empire, wartime internment camps and post-war Britain, Murder at the docks is a deeply personal excavation of memory, resilience and pervasive silence.