Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (2 page)

7
Prisoner 228/36
91

1. The Bodysnatchers
   107
   

2. Domestic Violence
   139
   

3. Art of Survival
   165
   

4. Kangaroos
   189
   

5. MakingTrouble
   202
   

6. House of Horror
   211
   

7. Jailbirds
   237
   

8. ‘So Long, Farewell…’
   256
   

9. Holding the Keys
   266
   

Acknowledgements
275

Introduction

Sandra Gregory has a story to tell. It is the story of an ordeal that would have broken most people and came close to breaking her. Its redeeming features are her courage and resilience, and the enduring love and loyalty of her family. On the face of it, it is a story about a young woman imprisoned for drug trafficking in Thailand. It is also – and this is how she herself sees it – a story about love and the things people don’t say when they should.

In
1993
she was arrested at Bangkok airport, with her compan-

ion Robert Lock, about to board a flight for Japan. She was found to be carrying
89
grams of heroin for him. Her pay-off, had they not been intercepted, would have been the £
1
,
000
which would have bought her air ticket back to Britain with plenty to spare. It wasn’t the easy money that it seemed. Instead, she was sentenced by the court in Thailand to
25
years in prison. Robert Lock, already known to the police, was acquitted; he was released and had already re-offended while she was still in jail.

The title of Sandra Gregory’s book,
ForgetYou Had A Daughter
, comes from the letter that she wrote to her parents after her arrest. It is a story told without self-pity or self-justification.‘What I have done is not excusable,’ she writes,‘and above all else I knew better than to do what I did.’ Nor does she reproach the Thai authorities and their system of justice, except to allow herself the wry reflec- tion that their prison sentences are perhaps a touch on the long side.

She served four years in Bangkok before being transferred to British prisons including Holloway and Durham. She found them no better, and in some respects worse, than LardYao, the women’s section of the notorious ‘Bangkok Hilton’. Back in Britain she was spared no brutality, partly as a consequence of the length of her sentence, which led to her being classified – along with Myra Hindley and Rosemary West – as a high security risk. Anyone who thinks that we operate a prison system which, for all its faults, is fundamentally humane and decent, should read her personal account of it and think again. In Durham especially she found herself living in hell and surrounded by evil.And as for Holloway, it was ‘home to the biggest bunch of nutcases, psychos, robbers, thieves, druggies, gang members, whackos and dysfunctional lunatics I had come across’.

The irony was that, although detained in British prisons, she was outside the British justice system. She could be released only through a pardon by the King of Thailand. As her ordeal entered its eighth year, the prospect of the pardon still seemed remote. Her parents wrote to me, as to many other MPs, about her plight and the disproportionate length of her sentence. Sympathy for drug- smugglers was not a popular cause; but I am proud to have supported her own MP, the Liberal Democrat Malcolm Bruce, in his campaign for her release. The King’s pardon was eventually granted, following an adjournment debate initiated by Mr Bruce. Contrary to popular belief, MPs are sometimes able to play a part in making good things happen.

The chapter that Sandra Gregory wrote about her release, into a foreign country known as freedom, is one of the most eloquent in the book. She was still unsure of herself, and almost in a state of exploration, when she came to meet us in the House of Commons.The more I learned of what had happened to her, the more I felt that she should write it down, for the benefit of others; and I urged her to do so.

The road from Thailand to Oxford University does not regu-

Introduction

larly run through Holloway, Durham and Cookham Wood prison in Kent. Sandra’s acceptance by the University delighted her and helped to restore her confidence. But before going there she took a year out, not only to write the book, but to talk to high school students all over the country about the drug dangers awaiting the unsuspecting, especially young travellers in their gap years, not only in Thailand. I have spoken to some of the kids who listened to her. They could not have found a more credible witness. Without intending to, she had been to hell and back on their behalf.They were deeply moved and impressed.

I believe that Sandra Gregory’s book should be required reading everywhere, not just in our schools.Through her experi- ence, and her most eloquent account of it, she surely has saved and will save many others from the same ordeal.

Blessings don’t come in harsher disguises than this; but at the end of her story, and most remarkably of all, she describes what happened to her as ‘actually some kind of privilege’.The privilege is ours, that she has shared it with us.

Martin Bell

one

‘Boom, inThai,You Die’

6
February
1993

To my dearest parents, grandparents and brother

I am going to ask the hardest and very last thing from you all.

I do not want you to forgive me, what I have done is not excusable and above all else I knew better than to do what I did… I have not been wise and I am asking you all to please forget that you ever had a daughter, granddaughter or sister. I know that this will come as a shock. I am so very sorry for the shame I have brought on you all.

I needed to come home with my pride and this seemed the easiest and quickest way to do it. I have not been well for months now and have been so terribly homesick. I love you all and God I do miss you, but please never mention my name again, try to do as I say and act as though you never knew me and throw any photographs of me away. I cannot do five, ten or twenty years like this.You produced a wonderful human being who wanted to change the world, but has instead messed it up.

I am so very, very sorry. Sandra

Every few minutes the evening trains slip in and out of the dark- ness in Hualumphong Railway Station in Bangkok and I watch them roll on their tracks, bursting with commuters. Masses of dark faces emerge, like spectres, from the carriages and they stare at me as they amble through the station. Except for the grind of metal

and iron the only thing I can hear is the sound of my own heart- beat. I am sticky, wet and very tired.

It is rush hour and the effort of standing here alone, while waiting for Robert Lock, is unbearably painful. My thoughts stray to home, in West Yorkshire, and to my mother and father and grandparents, in Scotland, and how I will be seeing them all soon. I run my fingers across my new travel bag. The bag and also my new clothes – a white cotton shirt with tiny blue, purple and green flowers on it, a pair of baggy cotton trousers and a pair of green suede court shoes – help disguise the way I am feeling. In a way they have turned me into someone else, someone innocent.

I pace up and down the small stretch of platform, flexing my legs, feeling the light bead of perspiration on my upper lip. Does anyone have any idea what I am planning? Can they see it in me? Does every glance I make, searching for Robert, give me away?

‘It’s not really you carrying the drugs,’ I repeat over and over like a mantra. ‘Just a few more days and you will be home.’ I am
27
years old and I almost believe it.

Where is Robert? He is late. For an hour I have stood here at the express train ticket point, where we have arranged to meet. Ruth Billingham, his girlfriend, is coming with him and we will all fly to Tokyo together.What will I do if they don’t appear? One thing’s for sure: I won’t go to the airport by myself.

The light is fading as the last express train pulls away. It is well after
6
.
00
pm and we should have been on it.A knot, the size of a small child’s fist, appears again in my stomach and I sigh nervously. A man walks by me, staring. I’m sure he knows.

On the platform, next to where the trains are leaving, I feel completely alone and I want to abandon the plans I have made. It would be simple. All I need to do is walk away from the station, and return to my apartment. I still have time to throw this terrible stuff away, out of my mind and out of my life for good.

Suddenly, frantically, Ruth is running towards me, waving her arms. My stomach heaves again. Ruth, with her bleached-blonde

hair and rugged features, is wearing a pair of very tight jeans and a T-shirt, and she looks more frightened than me.

‘Where have you been?’ she demands, as she gets closer, her face contorting with mild fury.

‘I’ve been here for over an hour waiting for you and Robert,’ I reply, slightly annoyed by her tone.

It turns out that there are two express train ticket offices and we have been standing at different ones. Robert, meanwhile, is frantic and angry, his face like an exit wound. He virtually ignores me when we catch up and I sense he blames me for the mix-up. Things are not going well but I’m in too deep to back out now so I suggest we get a taxi to the airport.

‘No,’ he snaps, picking up his bags, ‘we’ll get a train.’ Robert dashes around the station, across the rails and up the tracks while Ruth and I trail behind, like useless acolytes. Eventually he finds a train that is going to the airport area of Bangkok.The three of us, hardly saying a word, clamber aboard. Faces, heads, hands, elbows are hanging out of the windows and there is little in the way of air. Again, I wonder if anyone suspects anything. Have they any idea what I am attempting? Do these people – who are brushing against my legs, touching my hands, breathing on me, breathing on windows – do they have any idea I am carrying heroin? Would

they care?

Chunks of metal grate against the tracks, and the train crawls onwards, stopping at each station; perhaps, more hopefully than anything else, I think we will miss the plane. I still have time to walk away and my family will never know. No one will ever know.

Leave them, Sandra. Leave them.

Weeks earlier I developed acute pains in my abdomen, which were excruciating, and now they are intensifying. It is a monster pain, like nails splitting through my flesh, and it’s getting worse as the train rattles to its destination. It had been high in my stomach but now it has travelled down my right-hand side towards the bottom of my ribcage. I lean over the back of a seat with one of

my bags rammed into my ribs because the pain is so bad and I barely have the strength to make a fist. I can hardly stand up straight.

The train might slow down, Sandra, it might even break down.

The heat inside the train rolls back and forth across my face while the number of passengers multiplies at every stop; they become my co-conspirators.They do nothing to stop me.

‘Get off the train,’ I whisper to myself.‘Take a taxi, a motorbike, a tuk-tuk, anything, but just go.’ I want to be braver than I have ever thought possible, but I can’t.

A scuffle breaks out halfway to the airport and the train comes to an unscheduled halt. A group of men jump off, grabbing a young man who is fleeing and he is dragged back to the carriage. They sit him in a window seat, while one man from the group sits next to him and the others surround him. It is a citizen’s arrest.

Eyes popping and scared, the young man is very agitated. I look at Robert, but he just stares through the grimy windows so I shut my eyes, and try to forget the thoughts I am having. What will happen if one of the packages bursts? Will it kill me? The thought of death doesn’t concern me. I wipe another bead of sweat from the top of my lip.

It feels like I’m watching an old movie where I already know the ending, where I can actually see it, even feel it; it is swimming inside me, but I pretend it’s all new and that I’ll still be surprised by the outcome. I know what is going to happen. I pretend and imagine it will all work out – although I have a strange foreboding that it won’t. If I can just do this, get to Japan, and take the money that Robert has promised me, then travel back to Bangkok. After that I will have enough money to buy a plane ticket and return home. I have even made a list of all the presents I will buy my family and friends and their children.

I think of my dad.Whenever he went away on a business trip he always returned with presents for my mum, my brother and myself. I want to do the same. Everyone will be amazed that I have

stayed away so long, but they will welcome me back with open arms, and there will be no questions. Then I’ll regale them with stories of my adventures over the previous two years, about my life in a tropical paradise, with beaches on numerous islands too beau- tiful to describe – it almost hurts to imagine them again.The only difficult questions I will face will be my own. And I can dream away the bad bits.

Eventually we reach our station.We get off. Robert and I begin arguing over the direction we should go. Finally, for some reason, my logic prevails and we skip over a bridge, and arrive in the airport terminal. Our flight is leaving in
20
minutes but we are so

late getting there that all the other passengers have already checked in and are sitting on the plane.

‘We’ll check in, then separate,’ Robert says. ‘OK,’ I reply.‘Fine.’

We reach the check-in counter and just as we are about to present our tickets, three or four men arrive.

‘Mr Lock,’ says one man,‘you’ve come already. Please come this way.’

All of them are wearing casual shirts and trousers. Each of them hides behind rather ominous-looking, gold-rimmed mirrored glasses; they possess an efficiency and urgency that is immediately unsettling.Who are they?

‘Are you with him?’ one man asks.

‘Yes,’ I reply,‘I am.’ I bite my lip and nod.

For some stupid reason I think they have a list of all the passen- gers who have booked on our flight and who are late in arriving at the terminal. I imagine they are going to expedite our journey to the plane. Robert’s face doesn’t see it my way and he has the vacant look of a child who has been caught doing something wrong.