The stuff of scandal
Petronella Wyatt
A_n hour before arrival in Malaysia they hand you a visitors' card, It says in huge red letters: 'Drugs trafficking or possession is punishable by the death penalty.' This is a pretty stark welcome, as welcomes go, which immediately induces paranoia in the traveller, recalling those times at school when someone had scrawled graffiti on the common-room table but you were the one who blushed like Judas.
As the plane skidded onto the runway, opalescent in the hot sun, the conviction that someone had planted drugs in my wash-bag had me by the vitals. The walk through customs and immigration was like a slow stroll through the Valley of Death. You know how it is with customs, anyway. You look at them furtively to make sure they are not looking at you and then you catch their eye. They ask to go through your wash-bag. The bottle of aromatic oil has leaked and everything is covered in a thick slick of Otto Rose Bulgare Grade A, late of SW1.
Fortunately, the stench discourages the customs people slightly and the narcotics remain undetected. I slumped back in relief during the drive into Kuala Lumpur. The landscape resembled a massive salad bowl. There were palm trees covering every inch, in between which peaked soil the colour of the Duchess of York's hair. Formerly British, Malaya is made up of 55 per cent Malay Muslims, and about 30 per cent Chinese, who are economically dominant. The Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir, is Asia's longest-serving leader, having been in power since 1981. The country has seen a dramatic economic expansion, so that Kuala Lumpur looks like parts of Seattle imposed on old Brighton. The turrets of the colonial railway station and the magnificent 19th-century mosque have become reconciled to Starbucks Coffee and Planet Hollywood. So well have people done that one property magnifico has had his office floor paved with jade.
It is still possible to feel like Alan Quartermain. The most amusement to be had is looking at precious stones. Old women, whose eyes have a mineralised remoteness of their own, sit behind trays of gems like mythical guardians of childhood nightmares: aquamarines, diamonds, amethysts, topazes, emeralds and sapphires — all in the raw, like fish on a market stall. Once these stones have reached the West the mark-up for the tax and the setting is so great that in Malaysia a good amethyst can be had for £40 and a sapphire for £150.
Chinatown still has coffin-makers and launderers, apothecaries, tailors and pawnbrokers. On the arcaled pavements men dip candles and teach caged birds to sing, sell charms, carve jade and play mah-jong. When the British ruled Malaya they found it an unsettling place. Malaya was the rubbish heap of empire, `Surbiton on the Equator', where lived the &mode, the failed and the uncool. There were more suicides in Kuala Lumpur than in all of British India. In England the 'tragic wives of Malaya' became the stuff of scandal. They went to pot, they drank cocktails with breakfast, they made mischief and committed adultery. The awful soul-deadening, brain-destroying monotony of it all.
In 1911, one case transfixed Malaya. Ethel Proudlock, the young wife of a British rubber planter, was accused of shooting a neighbouring mine manager. William Steward. She claimed Steward had tried to rape her whereupon she fired at him. The drawbacks to her defence were that her husband was out of town but she was wearing a low-cut evening gown and that she fired three shots into Steward's body while he was lying dead on the ground. The jury sentenced Mrs Proudlock to be hanged by the neck until she was dead. This was the first time a white woman had received the death penalty. Against the wishes of British officials, however, she was pardoned by the Sultan of Selangor, and left the country. When Somerset Maugharn visited Malaya in 1921, Mrs Proudlock's lawyer told him about the case, even suggesting he write a story about it. He did: The Letter was later made into a high-camp movie with Bette Davis.
I walked down the street off Chinatown where the Proudlocks' sad little bungalow used to stand, Malaysia recently had another 'trial of the century'. Doctor Mahathir's former deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, was put on trial for sodomy after being dismissed in 1998 for immoral behaviour. He has now been in prison for six years and may be there for 20. Now, if only our Tony had thought of that.
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