Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (24 page)

There was no appeal from the prosecutor and one month after the verdicts Robert went home. He was driven out of Klong Prem Prison in a police pick-up truck and taken to a nearby police station to sign release formalities.While he had been in jail, he had

been given a
15
-month suspended sentence for possession of heroin, but he appealed the conviction and had it overturned at the appeal hearing.

Years later, when I read about Robert’s release, I discovered that he had said that the certainty of his innocence had given him the strength to survive. He refuted all my allegations and claimed he had never known me. While his acquittal had stung me at the time, I soon realised Robert’s ‘not guilty’ verdict made absolutely no difference to my own situation. I was still guilty. I pushed Robert out of my mind and gave him very little thought again.

Prime Minister John Major arrived in Thailand on
29
February
1996
(the day after I was sentenced) for an international summit. He said he had no plans to intervene on my behalf, while British officials said that it was not possible for them to make any utter- ances or involve themselves in matters that were for the Thai authorities.

The Foreign Office had already stated they wouldn’t intervene on my behalf, yet it was still difficult to accept given Major’s previ- ous position. What I couldn’t understand was why Major had helped Karyn Smith and Patricia Cahill but refused to do the same for me. He had written to the Thai authorities on their behalf, and he did not question their convictions but asked for mercy on humanitarian grounds.Why was I so different?

At the beginning of
1996
the number of women in Lard Yao

went up to roughly
2
,
800
and the overcrowding problem became immense. Around March the temperatures regularly rise above
100
o
C and, in this searing heat, squashed together, tempers erupted easily. Most inmates tried counting the hours until shower time when they could escape the heat under cool water.

One Saturday morning we got up to find the water tanks in the room bone dry and I ran straight out of the room to try to grab a shower before anyone else. No luck, the tanks there were dry also. The prison stayed this way until Monday morning.

No one washed themselves, or their clothes and cutlery, or brushed their teeth. Likewise, babies and children did not wash and the toilets became blocked with solid waste. Even the sewer was dry; piles of dirty pans stacked up in the kitchens. That weekend the smell was overpowering and we all lived in our own, drying filth.

Fortunately, on the first day of the ‘dry time’ I had managed to get hold of a bucketful of water and I sat guarding it all day; I wanted a wash before getting locked in for the night. I agreed to share the water with another woman and at
4
o’clock she went for

a brief wash. I watched as the handle on the bucket broke, and the contents fell to the ground, spilling across the concrete.There was not enough water left to scrape across our teeth.

Someone realised on Monday that the water valve outside the gate had been turned off and by lunchtime the problem was resolved. By now everyone was desperate for a wash. As water gushed through the pipes into the tanks and out of the shower- heads, a group of Nigerians ran to the tanks and urinated all over the ground. No one wanted to walk barefoot across their urine; they had ensured a space for themselves by a tank of water.

On
9
June
1996
the King of Thailand granted an amnesty to cel- ebrate his Golden Jubilee and I was given a reprieve of just over three years, an eighth off my total sentence. Drug cases had been included in the amnesty for the first time in years but the reduc- tions were so small they hardly counted. Everyone who had been preparing themselves for release sank further into depression.

The size of my reduction reflected the fact I had only just been sentenced and had not had time to take any of the prison amnesty classes.The woman who slept on the floor next to me, who had chopped her husband up into eight pieces and thrown him in the

river, had her
25
-year sentence cut down to
12
years.Around
290

Thai prisoners were released, along with three foreigners from the men’s section of Klong Prem Prison.

A Buddhist monk who had murdered a British tourist expressed gratitude for the reduction of his death sentence to life imprisonment by the king. Yodchart Suephoo, who became a monk after hiding a prison conviction for rape, had killed Johanne Masheder, a girl from Chester, in December
1995
, when she visited a temple popular with tourists. Johanne was pushed down a steep drop in a cave on the temple compound, and then beaten to death with a rock. Her partly burned remains were discovered a month later. I was in such fine company, but according to Thai opinion my crime had been one against the whole of humanity, not just one person, and I was thus less deserving of the king’s leniency than murderers.

I accepted my small reduction with the vice of stubborn pride. I would deal with it, just as everyone else would have to deal with their tiny reductions.

There was less and less space for women to sit on in the mornings and we washed, got ourselves ready, ate breakfast and tried to live a normal life, squashed together on top of each other. Kerry, an Australian girl, had been in LardYao for almost
10
years and every morning she would sit with her Thai friends. Once, while they were eating breakfast, a Nigerian stood over them, scraping her tongue with a prison-made knife. Kerry and her mates tried to ignore the scraping but when the Nigerian began combing her pubic hair over their rice, the Thai girls asked Kerry to get her to stop.

‘If she wasThai we would speak to her,’ said one of the girls,‘but she is not.You are a foreigner so you must ask her to be polite.’

Kerry asked the Nigerian to comb her pubic hair elsewhere. ‘Fuck off,’ said the Nigerian.

Losing face in front of your friends in prison is avoided at all costs so Kerry confronted the Nigerian woman and a fight broke out.The rules in Thailand were usually clear. Fight a Thai and you fight them all, but fight a non-Thai and you are left on your own.

Because of Kerry’s standing amongst the Thais she was considered as Thai as any foreigner can be. When the fight erupted loads of Thais jumped up to give her a hand.

The other Nigerians joined in and a pitched battle ensued. A voice boomed over the tannoy. It was a guard calling all the Thai girls to help their ‘sisters’. From all over the prison came Thais car- rying sticks, stones, knives and machetes and they beat the Africans to a pulp. Deng had two large sticks in her hand and she cornered Anna, the Nigerian who had been at court when I had been taken there from the police station.

‘Take a stick to defend yourself,’ she ordered Anna. ‘No, I don’t want to fight.’

‘Take the stick or you die,’ Deng screamed.

‘But I don’t want to fight.’Anna was almost in tears. Finally she took the stick from Deng.

As soon as Anna had taken hold of it, Deng screamed out, ‘Good, now you have a stick it is fair.’ She proceeded to pound Anna’s face to a pulp.The whole prison, it seemed, was fighting; someone had broken glass from a jar hanging out of her face, while another looked as if she might lose her arm. The blood, thick and red, covered the concrete and surrounding area.

This was more than the guards had counted on.The situation had escalated from a fight into a riot and the guards, fearing a mass break-out, called the riot squad from the men’s prison, which arrived shortly to quell the rioters. Those not involved in the fighting moved away as quickly as possible or looted what they could from unattended bags.

Me? I just sat on the stairs, watching in amazement. Nothing like this had happened before and it wasn’t my fight so I stayed on the sidelines. I knew how the Thais fought when they were protecting one of their own. I saw the riot squad arriving with shields, batons and truncheons, and I walked away from the bloodbath. It didn’t matter why I was in prison; all I cared about was survival.

*

Some time later, I was moved from the remand room where I had slept for over three years into Pyleen, the building for prisoners sentenced to less than
25
years.Although the room was larger, and a better place to sleep than where I had been living, there were over
180
women there.The women there were more settled; they knew their sentence and had accepted it.

Stepping over the rows of bodies one evening to go to the toilet, I saw a tiny girl lying on the floor covered in blood.
Shit
,I thought,
she’s been stabbed
, and I shook her awake. She had the eyes of a frightened doe.

She had not been stabbed but was lying in a pool of her own menstrual blood. I asked some of the Thais if they would lend me a sanitary towel.‘Oh, yes, Sandee, I give for you,’ said a number of girls, but when I told them the towel was for the young girl they refused. Nolay was a hilltribe girl who came from the mountains in the north of Thailand, on the border with Burma and Laos, and spoke hardly any Thai. She was also very poor.That night I could- n’t do anything but the next day I had a visit and gave my visitor a long list of things to collect for me. I waited for the young girl and later that night I gave her the bag of stuff. She dropped to her knees in front of me and put her hands up to her nose in thanks. I could see she was crying.The little mountain girl hugged the bag. I watched her as she slept with her arms and legs wrapped around the bag all night. She never let go of it once.

Nolay felt she had to repay me and every night in the room she made me ‘friendship’ bands and gave me two-hour long massages. Her name was Nolay and the prison had given her the surname Mai Me Namsakoon, which curiously means ‘no have surname’.

She guessed she was aged between
24
and
28
. She had arrived

from the mountains with a man she knew who had given her a two-inch drinking straw full of heroin to hold. Upon their arrival in Chiang Mai, the man had gone to the police and told them what Nolay was carrying and she had been arrested.

For a fifth of a gram of heroin, Nolay was charged with

trafficking and because she had no money, and could not afford a lawyer, she received a prison sentence of
21
and one-third years. She had been arrested with her baby but the police took him away and she never heard anything about him again.With no money, no baby, no surname and no family who knew where she was, Nolay did her best to survive LardYao. I bought her new uniforms, sup- plied her toiletries, took her to get her hair cut and invited her to come and eat with me twice a day. Eventually, when it was time for me to leave LardYao, Nolay clung to my waist and cried like a child.

Six months after I left, Nolay got sick and swelled up like a balloon. Her hair fell out, she turned yellow and died.As the body bag was driven out of the gates the authorities in attendance called out to her,‘Nolay No Have Surname, release yourself.’

Many of the convicted mothers in prison have been arrested on drug-related charges.Thai people know that if they are convicted of a drugs charge they will probably never see the outside world again, so their children are brought up either by the family or in a state-run children’s home. Either way, many of the women in Lard Yao never see their children again.

If a woman was pregnant when she was arrested, the baby would be born in the prison, often in the chair where the ‘inti- mate’ strip searches were carried out, but possibly in the hospital wing.Young children and babies arrested with their mothers can stay in Lard Yao until they are three years old. If no one comes to take them, such children are sent to a state-run orphanage, and the mothers will never see them again. There are many sad sights in Lard Yao, but watching a child being taken away from its mother and walked out of the gate was one of the saddest.

The children are kept in the building euphemistically called the ‘nursery’ and are tended to by Thai prisoners, whilst their mothers are working in the factories. Some of these workers were brutal women who often took a sadistic pleasure in harassing their

charges. One day I went there to donate something and saw a toddler tied by her ankle to a pillar.The nursery women had made a rope and tied the toddler to it because she kept crying. She had ugly rattan welts all over her legs.The women whipped the chil- dren with two-foot-long rattan sticks.

Because overcrowding is a problem, babies and toddlers sleep on the floor, with their mother wrapped around their bodies, trying to keep away from the person squashed next to them. Skin conditions and sickness are common. For the first three years of their lives they never see cars, or shops, or men, or anything most people consider normal.They receive an authentic prison experi- ence before they are old enough to walk.

The library was a small, shelved room next to one of the main offices and, like the bakery, it was another of the prison show- pieces. With no newspapers and no access to the media, most people developed a passion for reading books. I read everything from the instructions on a tube of toothpaste to
Papillon
, by Henri Charrière.There was an excellent collection of books donated by fellow and former inmates, over many years. Mostly I read about imprisonment and crime stories, but would escape with travel books and spy tales. I was in LardYao for over six months before I could concentrate on reading anything as demanding as a book. My mind was in such a whirl that anything that didn’t demand immediate attention was dismissed. I watched others jealously as they disappeared into a good book, hoping that I might rekindle my own appetite for reading. Eventually I did and every evening I began escaping into Brian Keenan’s
An Evil Cradling
, his account of his ordeal in Lebanon, where he was held hostage for years by terrorists. In comparison with what he had gone through I realised that I had nothing to moan about. I was not a hostage; I deserved to be where I was. His book gave me a great deal of strength and without it I doubt I would have been able to endure what lay ahead.