Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (30 page)

I hadn’t really thought about her at that time.‘No,’ I replied,‘not yet.’

Some hours later I spotted her walking around the wing and she looked exactly the same as she had in all the pictures I had seen of her in magazines and newspapers.The sweater, the short hair, the large glasses; I was transfixed.‘
Oh, my God
,’ I thought,‘that’s
Rose West
.’

She seemed to scuttle around the place, not walk, as if she was always making plans for something and her manner of walking helped keep her occupied. She also appeared blinkered, as if she found it impossible to see anything else around her. Later I realised that Rose actually doesn’t see much that goes on around her at all. There were many times I would be standing right next to her and she just didn’t see me.

The sight of her brought me out in a chill.
Jesus
, I thought,
why am I here?These women are child-killers, murderers, serial killers, arsonists, terrorists, paedophiles and all manner of beasts.And West. She’s a fucking monster
. I looked at her again, as she scuttled into a corner, and decided never to speak to her. Even though there were only
44
of us on that wing I would not speak to her – how could I, knowing what she had done to so many young women?

A few days later I had a visit from home. The routine was always the same; we had to go through to the workshop before we went for visits. Standing in line, I turned to the person behind me and asked them whether I’d need a sweater in the visiting room. Most people imagine that prisons are cold, miserable places but Durham was usually quite hot. I didn’t know if it would be warm in there.

‘I wouldn’t really know,’ came the voice of the woman standing behind me,‘I’m not often in there.’

It was Rose West.The hairs rose on the back of my neck while my stomach twisted at the thought of her standing right behind me, talking to me. Breathing on me.
How can I possibly be talking to this woman?
I turned away without smiling or acknowledging her response…

The most unsettling thing was that it didn’t take me long to realise that although Rose West was regarded by most people outside of prison as the most abominable creation, from where I stood, she was not the worst, not by a long shot; she is just the one everyone knows about.And in Durham she was a whole lot easier to live around than many others. One day, after watching Rose over some time, and listening to what others told me about her, I gave her an egg, and in so doing created a different relationship. She was never quite what I would call a friend, but we did speak at length over a period of months.

I tried, on the whole, to be optimistic. Perhaps Durham might even be a valuable learning experience. Daily, I would tell myself that I wouldn’t be here long so I would use it as an observation point. I would observe the system and the people here to pass the time and look at it from a sociological perspective.

In reality I sat around sinking deeper and deeper into depres- sion. I could hardly believe the crimes some of these people had carried out, yet there I was, sitting next to them, eating breakfast, showering and working alongside them.Two women I met were

each serving life sentences for imprisoning and abusing a
14
-year- old girl for five days, and I sat with one of those women every morning before we went through to the workshop to paint pottery.

During the five days they had tied her down to a bed, raped and battered her, pulled her toenails out with a pair of pliers, burnt her with cigarettes and force-fed her disinfectant. On the sixth evening they took her to a remote spot, poured petrol over her and set her on fire. Burns victims don’t usually die straight away though, and the youngster was no exception. It was while in intensive care that she gave the names of those who had tortured her and they were caught. She died a few days later.

Then there was DA, who imagined herself as some sort of special-forces specialist. She had a ‘thing’ about older men. She had already served a prison sentence as a teenager, for the manslaugh- ter of an elderly man. DA was on H-wing serving two life sentences for stabbing two pensioners through the side of the neck with rusty screwdrivers. She was one girl who gave me the creeps constantly.

Everything about her oozed evil.There was a spate of cell fires on the wing and no one was ever caught for them. According to the rumours, DA had been setting them all off; it made her feel important. She enjoyed the fact that women on the wing could have been smoked or burnt to death.Week after week she would pirouette with glee as another cell was gutted and closed off. DA was determined someone would die in a fire.

2
August
1998

Dear Mum and Dad

I honestly have no idea why I am here, but I got a cutting from
The Times
newspaper this morning and they seem to have been told all about my move. How can the press know why I am here when I don’t? If they really do think that I was planning an escape then chances are I’m going to be here forever… I have no idea how

these people think or how they come up with their conclusions, but I suspect that a lot of it is just a charade.Trying to help Sylvie has me classed as a security risk… it’s all madness. But maybe I am the mad one. I should never have come back. I should have stayed in Thailand.

Sandra

I asked anyone in a uniform who had the time to listen, why I was there. After several days a governor informed me that there had been security information reports against me since I had arrived from Thailand, and the decision had eventually been taken to move me after false fire alarms had been set off in Foston Hall.

‘But, they don’t really think it was me who set off the alarms, do they?’ I asked. My response was pathetic.

‘No, they don’t, Sandra. It’s a bit more complicated than that, I’m afraid.’That was it. No explanation, no discussion.

It took me over three months to find out why I was in Durham and I nearly collapsed when I got the information. I received a copy of a letter that a magistrate I know had received from her MP.The MP had written to a prison minister asking for informa- tion as to why I was in Durham.The letter stated that suspicions were raised that I had sent my passport out to my parents as soon as I got to Holloway. I had done so because in LardYao that was the first thing prisoners, especially non-Thais, are ordered to do; otherwise it is likely to go ‘missing’.

I had also arrived in Britain ‘with a quantity of foreign money’, which was deemed enough to pose security risks. That quantity was a
10
-dollar bill and
20
Dutch guilders, hardly enough money to flee to South America. Furthermore, I had also been considered a ‘bad influence on younger inmates’ and suspected of organising ‘hooch’ brewing in Foston Hall. The drink they had found had been in the cell of a friend of Sylvie’s, the young girl I had eaten toast with and who I had tried to encourage to stop taking heroin.

The dossier continued. I had also been seen ‘speaking to a man in the visiting room who had come to visit someone he didn’t know’. The man in question was someone I had written to for years and he had agreed to give Sylvie his spare room when she got out of prison, rather than have her go into a hostel full of hookers and junkies. Sylvie had no family of her own and she had been brought up in foster homes. She was a bright girl and, after my own experiences, I desperately wanted her to get on in life away from the drugs. Naturally he had wanted to meet her before he opened his home to her and that was why he had visited.

In Foston Hall there had been a phone scam going on, which allowed prisoners ‘reverse charge’ calls. Ironically, I had always been too scared to attempt it. Liverpool Lindsey managed to blow the phone off the wall one day, trying out the scam, and I think I got the blame for that too. Then there were the fire alarm episodes.The officers had not managed to find out who had been responsible for setting them off.

Inevitably, when fire alarms go off the fire brigade are alerted. In a woman’s prison, bringing the fire brigade in for a bunch of cooped-up, sex-starved women is like inviting the Chippendales to an Anne Summers party. Not a good idea.The fire brigade are heroes – sexy heroes – and a whole truckful of them with helmets and hoses at the ready is better than television for many women with nothing much else to look at in prison. And the firemen seemed to like the attention they were given when they arrived. The girls inside would put on a real show for the boys.

So this was why someone was setting off fire alarms in Foston Hall. For some reason, because the guards couldn’t find out who it was, they used me as a scapegoat. One of the principal officers, a six-foot hulk of a woman, was in charge of the investigation into the alarms and saw me as an easy target.According to Lindsey, the Hulk had, a few weeks earlier, referred to me as an ‘arrogant tart’. Hardly enough for me to hate her but I knew I wasn’t her favourite inmate. In her report she said she believed I had found a

place for Sylvie to stay once she was released and in return Sylvie had set the alarms off for me. She also said that during the fire evacuation I was planning to hop over the fence and disappear; hence my status as a threat to national security.What a joke!

I could accept the sentence that had been handed down to me by the Thai Government but I found all this hard to deal with. As ridiculous as it sounds, my move to Durham was totally unjust and I began to get seriously down. There was no avenue of appeal. I had been well and truly stitched up by some fat screw who had it in for me and there was nothing I could do about it.

Eventually I got to see governors and tried desperately to explain why I would never attempt to escape, that it was the most preposterous idea that I would scarper over a wall.Where the hell would I go? Hide out with my parents in rural Aberdeen? I was hardly Ronnie Biggs material. I told them I had committed my crime inThailand in order to get home and I would never do any- thing that would keep me from home again. My reasoning and logic fell on deaf and amused ears.

‘You were clever enough to orchestrate a large drug smuggling ring,’ said one governor.

‘But it was three ounces,’ I told her.

‘That’s what you say, but I know different,’ she replied, her face neither expressive nor inexpressive.

The stupid woman thought
89
grams was the same amount as
89
kilograms. She thought I had attempted to smuggle
89
sugar- bagfuls of heroin.

4
August
1998

Dear Mum and Dad

I used to always say that this ordeal was ‘all character building stuff’.Well, now my character is built.They are now trying to demolish it. Being on H-wing is not as bad as trying to deal with the reason for being on H-wing. How can helping out a homeless

19
-year-old have led to all this surveillance stuff? I may be a bit of a wreck if you come down. Life is feeling like a nightmare and I know I’m getting paranoid, but nothing here is logical.

Sandra

When I was first arrested and I sat in the dirty police cells, one of my greatest fears was that I might live for years without ever seeing the sky again.As stupid as it sounds, I just couldn’t imagine not being able to see the clouds or be around anything natural. When I first entered Lard Yao there was a sense of relief when I saw grass and trees and the beautiful blue sky. But in Durham one of my greatest fears had materialised.

To all intents and purposes we were surviving in a modern dungeon; it was just so oppressive and claustrophobic. I had felt in Lard Yao that I was on the ward from the film
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. I was wrong. Durham was far more like it. Most of the women had serious psychiatric disorders and many were very dangerous. Not merely deemed dangerous by the system, but actually dangerous.A lot of the inmates should have been kept in psychiatric units.

Dawn was nuts. Inside for arson, she would literally ‘go off ’ with disturbing regularity. She was constantly being controlled and restrained by the guards and I got used to seeing her being bundled across the wing by four or five officers. Many nights we would be kept awake listening to the sounds of heavy thrashing, screaming and thudding echoing through the wing and, the next morning, Dawn would emerge from her cell looking like she’d been run over by a cattle truck.

She would stand, facing a wall, and bang her head against the bricks for hours. Later her forehead was a mass of glowing, red swelling. One day she threw herself off the stairs and was grabbed, in mid-air, by a guard who saved her from certain serious injury. In the process she nearly pulled him over the railings. H-wing was always colourful when Dawn was around.

H-wing is merely a wing of a prison, and everything needed to keep a prisoner secure is there; the cells, all the offices, a cell where the doctor came to issue mind-numbing medication, a tiny gym, two filing cabinets of books for a library and the servery where we ate our food.

Food in Durham came in two colours: pale and bland. Pale chips were cooked three hours before they were served up and pale pies were like something left over from an abattoir’s toilet. There were always pots of porridge and pale bread. Pale food fed pale people.And the pale people grew increasingly tense at having to eat so much pale, crappy food. Even the prison doctor, when- ever he entered H-wing, arrived with more than a hint of trepidation. He wore a suit and a pair of Nike trainers so he could leg it off the wing at speed when necessary.

Noise pollution in any prison is unbelievable but on H-wing it almost drove me insane. As soon as the cell door is opened it hits you, slap-bang in the face. Cell doors are clanked open like coffins. Prisoners clatter around, shouting; they go for breakfast, arguing, calling out to their friends; guards bark orders from the ground floor to the fourth floor (the echo made a better intercom than an electronic one did); radios blare; stiff keys are turned in locks, while the security chatter in walkie-talkies echoes. Boots stomp on metal floors. It is constant and incessant and utterly numbing.