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rape and a good deal that tells against it,’ one official said. Sercombe Smith was especially critical and accused the sultan of acting despotically. His action amounted to a slur, he said, which no self-respecting judge should have to endure.

      The pardon had come with a condition. In return for being released from prison, Mrs Proudlock would have to leave the country. Though she had no choice in the matter, she was probably glad to go. She must have understood that Malaya had washed its hands of her. It was not a kind place. If she had stayed, her life would have been a hell.

      News of the pardon reached KL at three o’clock that Saturday afternoon and, two hours later, Anthonisz signed the papers authorizing Mrs Proudlock’s release. At nine that evening, the Mail reported, she ‘was free and was being embraced outside the gate of Pudu Jail by her husband. Her father and mother … were also there to welcome her. Mrs. Proudlock was not attired in prison clothes, she having changed into clothes which her mother had forwarded … Nobody save her relatives were present at her release. She was in a highly nervous condition and, to avoid the possibility of a breakdown, she was advised to retire at once on her arrival at her destination.’

      The day after her release, Mrs Proudlock did something rather unusual for a woman of her supposedly reclusive nature: she agreed to be interviewed by the Malay Mail. As described by the paper’s reporter, she was very pale and had lost a lot of weight but, that aside, he said, she looked ‘considerably brighter and more cheerful than at any period during her appearance in court’. Mrs Proudlock, ever conscious of the figure she cut, had dressed for the occasion in a cream-coloured suit.

      Ethel told the Mail that she would soon be leaving for Penang where, after a short rest, she planned to sail for England. Though she had been given just four days in which to wind up her affairs, she made no mention of being under any pressure. She was going to London, she said, because she needed a complete change if she was ever to regain her health.

      ‘It may not be generally known that as soon as the death sentence was passed on me I was placed in the condemned cell. I was placed on a prison diet and ordered to wear prison clothes … I was allowed permission to see particular friends, but was not able to speak to them through the iron bars of my cell. How I must have looked I cannot say.’

      Her mental health became so precarious, she said, there were fears she might do herself a violence: ‘I was watched day and night … I was even denied the use of a knife with which to cut food.’

      She continued to protest her innocence: ‘In spite of the fate hanging over me, I felt myself justified absolutely in the act I had committed. The horrors of my imprisonment were intensified because I had not the knowledge that I was suffering for my sin.’

      Though her gaolers had shown her every consideration, she described her time in prison as ‘truly wretched. I can only say I have the deepest feeling of gratitude towards all those of every race’ who extended their sympathy.

      In Penang, the Mail reported a few days later, Mrs Proudlock stayed with friends. Though who they might have been is hard to say. Ethel, at this point, cannot have had many friends. People had begun to understand the problems she had caused. She had become a pariah, and the morning she left KL, there was no crowd of well-wishers at the railway station to see her off; no farewell toasts; no tears; no promises to stay in touch. Wishing perhaps to deter the curious, the authorities had taken the precaution of keeping her plans a secret.

      There were no well-wishers, either, in Penang a week later when Mrs Proudlock, accompanied by Dorothy, her daughter, stood on Swettenham Pier, waiting to board the Hidachi Mars, a ship bound for Tilbury and flying the Japanese flag. Malaya heaved a sign of relief when the ship weighed anchor. It had rid itself, or so it thought, of a major headache.

      Five days later, Mrs Proudlock reached Colombo where ‘she was met on board by friends and went ashore with her child’. On 22 August, and looking ‘somewhat thin’, she reached England, then experiencing that rare phenomenon, a drought. When asked by a reporter to discuss her trial and incarceration, she declined. Nothing could compel to her to talk about it, she said; it was something she wished to forget. She did say, though, that she had returned to England in order to recuperate and that, while there, she would be staying with relatives. ‘I hope that Mr. Proudlock will be able to join me here in a few months’ time. But at present we cannot be sure of that.’

      Had she plans to return to Malaya at some point? Mrs Proudlock really couldn’t say. For the time being, she said, her only plan was to get some rest.

       4

       A Man on a Mission

      There was no rest, however, for William Proudlock. Back in KL, his problems had begun to compound. Throughout that summer he soldiered on, running VI, drinking at the club occasionally, turning up at St Mary’s – to see him, people said, one would think nothing had happened: that there had never been a murder; that Ethel had gone to England on holiday; that William Steward had never existed.

      Proudlock was unlikely to have been that self-deluding. And even if he were, it could not have been for long because on 10 October, Bennett Shaw, VI’s headmaster, returned from leave. Intending, perhaps, to tell him of Steward’s death, Proudlock had gone to the station to meet him, but Shaw, it turned out, was aware of the murder, having read of it in the British papers (the London press dubbed it ‘the murder on the verandah’). Doubtless he was appalled – not only because he liked the Proudlocks, but because of the opportunity it gave England’s moralists to revive a familiar charge: without Mrs Grundy to keep an eye on them, the British abroad lived lives of depravity and dissolution.

      Ten days later, the school marked Shaw’s return by honouring him with a concert. The Mail, lavish with its praise as usual, declared the event a huge success. The paper particularly enjoyed a suite of English folk songs with piano accompaniment. Only in passing is it mentioned that the pianist was William Proudlock. Poor man. He can only have played with heavy heart. In the week and half since Shaw’s return, the headmaster and he had had a chat during which Shaw explained that his presence at the school had become an embarrassment. Playing ‘Greensleeves’ that night, Proudlock knew his days were numbered. On 24 October, VI made it official; Proudlock had resigned his post, it was announced, and would be returning to England in the very near future.

      Before he went anywhere, however, he had to endure yet another ordeal: a charge of libel brought against him by his former friend, Detective-Inspector Wyatt. The action had its origins in a letter Proudlock wrote to a London weekly called M.A.P. (Mostly About People), in which he castigated the Selangor government for what he said was the highly irregular manner in which his wife’s trial had been conducted.

      Though Proudlock’s writing style is brisk and forthright, the letter clearly was composed in haste. Several words are misspelled, the Bible is misquoted, and his signature – hurried and careless; hardly more than a scrawl – looks as if it were penned by a child. (In the excerpts that follow, the spelling has been corrected.) Proudlock begins with an explanation. He was writing to the magazine, he said, to call ‘the attention of the British public to the state of things in [Malaya] which I feel sure every rightminded Britisher will heartily condemn. The press out here has apparently been unable to induce the authorities to abandon trial by assessors in favour of trial by jury and so, off my own bat, I am going to see what I can do in the way of moving the authorities at Home.’ He was not optimistic, he said. The London government knew little of the state of things in the FMS, so little that ‘one feels inclined to say with Elijah “Either they are talking or peradventure they sleep and must be awaked.”’ (The quotation, from the first book of Kings, chapter 18, verse 27, reads: ‘And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.’)

      Proudlock claimed that two men refused to sign the petition praying for a pardon for his wife,

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