Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (17 page)

As the truck left the prison grounds, the woman’s name was called out, over and over and her spirit was asked to leave the grounds with her.

‘Please,’ a voice shouted, ‘go now. It is time for your release, please leave the prison.’

I felt nausea. I wasn’t just shocked but also terribly frightened. There are places where perhaps death is expected, but here, in prison, it was even more disturbing. It was a beautiful morning, the sun was splitting the sky and the contents of this woman were pouring through a ceiling. The hospital was simply a public memorial to the dead.

I’ve always wondered how I would react if I ever witnessed something truly tragic. Now I know. Like the rest of the women I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t me. No one cried.We just looked on in astonishment.There was no noise, just the silence of a woman who was dead. I wish I could, but I still cannot recall her name.

At some time while in prison everyone dreamed of having their name called out, just to leave that squalid place, but no one wanted their spirit called. It was like being trapped in a horror movie.

From
6
.
00
am to
6
.
00
pm we were all out in the courtyard, a space roughly the size of a football pitch into which
1
,
700
women were crammed, later increasing to roughly
3
,
000
. Communication was initially difficult and my lack of Thai proved a hindrance. Learning the language, and something of the national way of life, was the only way to become accepted into the prison culture and to understand what the guards were saying. Otherwise I would have remained an outsider and would have known little of what was going on. Shortly after being arrested I had begun working in the officers’ laundry, and communicating how I felt or what I wanted was tricky without Thai.

The Thai social structure is made up of definite hierarchies, and Thais constantly reinforce their own social positions as well as

those of others with respect to themselves. It’s a big deal for a Thai to tell a European what to do, especially in prison where the pecking order is constantly being reinforced, so they would tell me to do things that weren’t necessary, and boss me around, just because they could. They would go through my things when I wasn’t there, and help themselves to what they wanted. From the start, I had to stick up for myself.

‘How do you tell these people to fuck off?’ I asked Karyn. ‘Just say it in English,’ she told me.

When the need presented itself I did.‘Fuck off. Just fuck off!’ They laughed at me. From then on I knew I needed their lan-

guage. Slowly I mastered it and I now speak it fairly well.With the language I also developed a temper and at times regretted the fact that I was now proficient. Every day I seemed to be arguing with someone in my new language. None of it was ever pretty.

The first time we got a letter handout from the censor, I was handed a large stack of mail. I couldn’t believe how many people had written. People from all walks of life – some known to me, others complete strangers – had made the effort. They wrote to condemn me and they wrote to console me.

In between receiving letters though the days passed slowly and, most of the time, I wondered what was really happening back home. My parents’ arrival had been one of the most wonderful experiences, yet it was tinged with such sadness that it was now almost unbearable to think about. As good as it had been to see them, I wished that they had stayed at home. I was going to have to do my time without them.

The only time the daily prison routine changed was on
5

December, which was the king’s birthday. That day the whole prison rose at four in the morning, washed quickly and attended prayers for an hour and a half.The same day Buddhist monks came into the prison and collected bags of dried food and toiletries that some of the women donated for the poor people of the city.

Initially, the routine was unbearably dull although, as the years passed, I would find more and more to occupy my time. Mostly, we behaved like zombies.Yet it was the inmates who generally ran the prison, although they were never in control of it. When the officers gave out the orders certain prisoners began the process of unlocking or, at least, the unbolting of their fellow convicts. Prisoners calculated the prison and factory accounts, constructed and repaired buildings, fixed faulty wiring, ran the hospital, cooked the food and, basically, did whatever else needed doing.

TheThai national anthem rang out at eight in the morning, fol- lowed by
10
minutes of prayer chant, in which many if not most of the prisoners participated. The Thai flag would be hoisted up a pole and the whole prison had to stand to attention, in rows of

blue, brown or brown-and-cream uniforms.The category of the girls wearing brown and cream was ‘appeal’.

We had to be at work between
8
.
15
am and midday. Between
12

o’clock and
1
was lunchtime, then back to work until
4
.
30
pm. From then until
5
.
30
or
6
.
00
pm we ate, and washed ourselves and our clothes. Between
6
.
00
pm and
6
.
00
am, we were locked in the rooms for the night. If we were lucky we found some time during the day to relax. After work everyone sat outside on mats. It was like a time-share arrangement.You could claim a space as yours as long as you used it, but only between the times not allocated for work.

Everything needed to be washed as soon as it was taken off so there were two washes per day. Women who did not have a washing line had to get their clothes washed and dried before the
8
o’clock bell. In the rainy season, drying clothes proved to be

extremely difficult and most of us went around wet. During this time most clothes and personal belongings turned mouldy and rotted.

Constantly, the rats would come out from the overflowing sewers to invade our spaces and any food left around would be chewed or eaten whole.The prison shop opened between seven

and eight in the morning and we had to buy our food for the day during that time. It also opened between midday and
1
pm but that was lunchtime, and if you didn’t prepare your food, eat, wash bowls and cutlery and collect your washing at that time then you never managed it at all. Lunchtime was no time to stand in massive queues.

When a prisoner wanted to speak to a guard (they were all female) we had to get down on our knees, clasp our hands in front of us in the attitude of prayer, and bow. Provided we showed respect for our superiors – and everyone was our superior here – we could usually get by without too much trouble.

Newspapers or news cuttings were not allowed, although some magazines were permitted. Radios and televisions were prohib- ited and no access to a telephone was ever granted, not even upon arrest.

Letters got through to us, although the censor handed them out sporadically, and on no given day of the week. If we were lucky we would receive mail roughly three times per month, although weeks might go by when there was no mail handed out at all. By the time mail came through it would often be at least four weeks old; it was never usually received in the order that someone had written it. A letter written in July might be received after one written in August or September.

Three one-page letters were permitted as outgoing mail each week, and every word that we wrote or received was diligently censored. Often the censor would tire of reading our mail herself and would get one of the other foreigners to read through it for her; gossip usually ran rampant through Lard Yao as a result. If deemed unfit the whole letter would go straight into what was

known as File
13
, without a trace or a word.

Whenever I went to court, for another attempt at a trial, I would smuggle out a roll of written aerogrammes and a book full of unwritten ones too. It was a tricky business getting them out,

especially so because Rifkin always stood over us as we changed into our court clothes. Rifkin had no reservations about grassing on her fellow inmates. The guards who searched us going out were never the same as the ones searching us coming back in so there was little chance of anyone noticing that I took out blank aerogrammes, spent the time in the holding cell writing as many letters as I could, passed them to a friendly court official for posting, and came back with none. As well as the court post I would pay a guard
50
baht a letter and she would post it for me, although I couldn’t afford to send many of those.

Writing home was a task because I always tried to sound upbeat and positive, although I was nothing of the sort.Yet letters were one of the things that kept me alive: from my mother, father, brother, friends, strangers. It was wonderful to receive their corre- spondence, even if it was just a short note or a scribble. Suddenly I was transported home to them. I could smell my home in those letters; especially letters from my family. I would pull the pages and the folds of the paper close to me and breathe them deeply. Sometimes I would not open them immediately; instead I would take them into my cell at night and just sit and imagine them writing. Maybe they would be at home, or in a coffee shop, or at work. It was wonderful.

Better still, if there was a photograph inside I would grab it from the envelope and hold it to me, looking around to see who had seen me with it. I would fly into a rage if other prisoners tried to look at it, which they often did. It was bad enough that I was there but to have my family in that prison with me while others poked their noses at them was too much.

I was never completely truthful in letters to my parents. It was just impossible to tell them how things really were. How could I tell them, for example, that a teenager had been electrocuted in the room I slept in?

She had arrived in Lard Yao the previous week with a girl- friend, looking like a couple. Both of them were young university

students.The father of one of the girls had been a policeman and he had suspected them of stealing money from his house. He had pressed charges against them, in order to show them what life is like in prison.

Even the hard-faced ‘mother of the room’ had a soft spot for those two and she allowed them to sleep next to each other. Each night one of the girls would go to the toilet area and take a rag hanging on one of the many pipes before proceeding to wipe the floor where they were to sleep. A lot of the prisoners did this because the floor was always so dirty.

This particular evening the young girl took the cloth and wet it. Then she scrubbed the floor. A few minutes later she took the cloth back to the pipe. As she hung the cloth up, the pipe broke. Inside the pipe was a live
220
-volt wire.The girl’s right hand went

through the pipe and she grabbed hold of the wire. There was a soft buzzing noise, then a sizzle of light. She was standing in half an inch of water and her left hip bounced off an old, metal, disused water cooler.

For a few minutes the sparks flew until her girlfriend, in a panic, grabbed a towel, twisted it into a makeshift rope and threw it around her friend’s neck, pulling her off the wire. She made a short sound with her throat and a low cry as she fell onto the floor. Her young body had fried and she lay on the ground, in a puddle, with smoke coming from somewhere inside her. It was one of the most horrendous and saddest things I had ever witnessed.All of a sudden she was dead. It was as if she had just slipped out of her own skin and disappeared.

The young girl’s father dropped the charges. He had taught her a lesson the hard way.The prisoner who was in charge of oversee- ing the electrics received her punishment. Following a cover-up, nothing happened to any officials at the prison.

Eventually I mastered the art of sleeping. I have no idea when this was because I had no real concept of time in prison. Days and

months all looked the same. Sleep was the only possible escape.

At some point everyone gets used to sleeping in such condi- tions, but no one ever really sleeps straight through a night.With so many people it was just not possible. Often I would wake up to find the whole roomful of women had put away their pillows and towels and they were sitting around the door waiting to be let out. Curled up, in the middle of the linoleum floor, I would be lying there, completely alone.Why were they in such a panic?Why were they hurrying?

Every morning I would get up, go out and sit down on my blue mat. My priority for all those years was hot water in the morning so I could have a coffee. It was my own way of beginning the day in a fairly civilised fashion. The toilet could wait, the water tank could wait and the prison could wait.

Underneath a large, square area of parallel washing lines I would sit, next to the sewer, drinking my coffee. On good days I could stretch this out for half an hour, while on bad days I barely sat down and it would be time to get on with the day. If I was lucky a magazine or comic from home might have been passed by the censor and I would be dazzled by the current affairs of the day, or the latest mad-cap antics in
Viz
.
The Spectator
,
Time
and
Private Eye
magazines all helped keep me sane and oblivious to my sur- roundings.

But repetition soon becomes a prisoner’s enemy; at first it allowed me to grind out each day with at least a basic sense of purpose. Before long everything and every day became a carbon copy of the last, and nothing could relieve the resulting tension.

Whenever an officer was walking towards a prisoner, we would have to stop, turn sideways on the path, face inwards towards the officer with our heads down and wait for them to pass. Passing them without following this slightly ludicrous ritual was deemed to be insulting and disrespectful.As much as I hated having to do this, I was in Thailand and this was the way the prison ran. It was degrading, but it was also the rule.Yet I was still a fairly belligerent