Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton (25 page)

The woman working in the library came looking for me one day, telling me to take out as many books as I could store because the library was going to be closed for a while. There was no reason. It closed for months. ‘It is not tidy,’ was the common excuse. ‘It needs organising to make it look orderly.’ When it finally reopened most of the good books had gone. A few old romance paperbacks sat neatly on a few shelves and a pile of Bibles remained. The rumours circulated that the books had been taken by a group of American missionaries who sold them in one of the second-hand bookshops in the city. ‘It’s not good for you to think too much,’ someone told us. ‘It gives you new ideas.’

During my time in LardYao, hundreds of prisoners became men- tally ill due to the stress placed upon them, but there had to be something seriously wrong with a prisoner before she was allowed basic hospital care. Winnie was a beautiful, charismatic,
23
-year-old Eritrean, who looked like a model. She had a quiet, polite demeanour and those who didn’t hate her immediately for her beauty took to her instantly. A year after her arrest, Winnie received a
40
-year sentence. She had no embassy, no family, no friends and no money.The man who had claimed he loved her, the man whose drugs she had been carrying, had abandoned her and no one came to see her while she was inside. Rarely did she receive any letters. Emotionally, she began deteriorating and con- tinued doing so until it was impossible to hold a normal conversation with her. Rapidly, she lost her stunning good looks and in their place appeared the gaze of a LardYao lunatic.Winnie was close to losing her mind and is not expected to survive her sentence.The common denominator with most of these stories? Men. Most, if not all, the women on drugs charges in LardYao had been recruited or duped by a man. Few, if any, of the women worked for themselves.

*

My sleeping space in Pyleen was a few inches bigger than my space over the previous years.The ‘mother of the room’ shoved me over and told a scrawny young girl to sleep in between my neigh- bour and me. Lui Lee and I looked in horror at what lay in between us; the girl was wild, filthy and rather large. Her name was Ghoonk, meaning ‘shrimp’.

The following morning I decided to clean her up. I got her straggly hair washed and cut, bought her pyjamas and a bag of toi- letries – if she was going to sleep next to me all night I wanted her to be reasonably clean.

Ghoonk was
18
years old and in many ways reminded me of

myself at that age. She was one of Thailand’s many street orphans and had been living under a bridge in Bangkok. She was serving a short sentence for possession of heroin after developing a habit on the street. She couldn’t read or write so each evening we would have classes. She began calling me
mare
– mother.

There was also a separate class held most mornings for illiterate Thais, and Ghoonk, although under some duress, attended daily. Back in the room, after ‘class’, she would tell me to lie down.‘I’ll wash your hair, mum.’ I lay down while she scratched my back and my head with her fingernails.

Two blind kittens were dumped in a box on the bakery step and Ghoonk took care of them.After a few weeks the kittens were in great health and she would come running out of the room calling for them, ‘Dam-Dam-Dam, Sua-Sua-Sua.’ She loved them. Ghoonk was bright, and amazing and absorbing to watch. Holding a rat by the tail she would run around terrorizing others; she spent most days scrubbing the concrete around the wash area, and was always laughing. Nothing in LardYao fazed her.

Six months after I was shoved over to make her a space on the floor, Ghoonk was put on a list of names to be transferred out to a smaller prison in the provinces. As the guard called her name at five in the morning, she broke down. Her body shook uncontrol- lably as she cried.When she refused to leave the room, two guards

came in, prised her away from me and I never saw nor heard about her again. It’s not a moral story, just a sad one.

In Lard Yao most of the prisoners were uneducated but there were also others whose education far surpassed that of many of the officers.They could barely grasp how their social position had suddenly changed now that they were amongst some of the most leprous and cancerous individuals in Bangkok. Many of them had committed fraud or minor drug or victimless offences that would have merited non-custodial sentences in the UK.

One very bright woman, however, was there for murdering three of her husbands by hammering nails through their heads. In each of the cases, she claimed his life insurance. She had been a keen gardener and all three husbands had been buried in her garden. Before she could claim the third husband’s life cover, the police dug him up and charged her with multiple murder. She received the death penalty, but had it reduced to life imprison- ment eight years after being arrested. Like the cannibal before her, she had a job to suit her crime. She was LardYao’s head gardener.

What does prison do to a person after a number of years? You become aggressive, brooding, angry, vengeful, spiteful, profane and frustrated. Any adjective, really, that describes hostility. Hostility and aggression bred like bacilli in Lard Yao and I was amazed at how volatile I had become.

A French woman arrived in the prison on a drug possession charge and received a five-year sentence. Five years in Lard Yao is the equivalent of a weekend break and ‘the Slug’, as she became known, got none of the sympathy she thought she deserved. For

over
20
years the Slug had lived with a raging heroin habit and

now, in middle age, her whole body was a mass of green, infected craters. She was sly, selfish, manipulating and devious. For some reason Moo, the woman who worked in the hospital, felt sorry for her and spent hours massaging and preparing special food for her. She also stole medication for her.

This continued for weeks until a guard noticed the medication was going missing. Moo informed the Slug she could no longer take care of her. In turn, the Slug went straight to the prison office, telling the guards that Moo had been giving her sleeping pills and antidepressants. Immediately, Moo was put into the
soi
for the next three months.

How could the Slug do this? Daily, I grew more and more irri- tated. Every time I saw her, I let her know in no uncertain terms how I felt.When I was sitting up a flight of stairs one day, the Slug walked passed me, avoiding eye contact, but as soon as she was at the top, she looked down and said simply:‘You are a fucking dog.’ It took me about two seconds to grab hold of her. I wanted to kill her. It really felt like I wanted her dead. I hit her, hard and fast, and her nose began bleeding. I almost threw her over the balcony but my rage subsided almost as quickly as it had appeared and I left her. It never bothered me at all that, yet again, I had just fought with another woman. In prison you become the thing you abhor.

Fighting was normal. Fighting was acceptable.

Too many convicts succumbed to illness and disease in Lard Yao, the predictable result of dreadful conditions and even worse hygiene. Most drugs can be purchased inside the prison and, if someone was ill they could apply to see a man they called ‘the doctor’. It was a loose term. He came in most weeks and would quite happily write out prescriptions for the sick prisoner.

Once you had a prescription you would send it out with a visitor to buy the medication for you. Hopefully your visitor would return to the prison with the medication and hand it in at the gate.Then you had to wait until the medication was issued by the hospital and you could then start taking it. From getting ill to getting the medication to treat it normally took several weeks. Sometimes you could buy the medication directly from a ‘friend’ in Lard Yao. Pills were common inside and anyone with money usually kept a large bag of antibiotics and painkillers. I always had a

bag myself but I never managed to keep its contents very long. There always seemed to be someone close to me who needed them more than I did, and it didn’t take long for word to get around that I was the sucker for anyone with a hard luck story, illness or infection.

One morning, while I waited for the hoisting of the national flag, I saw a group of girls standing around another girl squatting on the ground. Her head was down and she held the side of her neck with her hands.The girl’s friends were collecting something from the back of that girl’s neck and appeared to be throwing leaves into the bushes. I went over to look.

A large hole had exploded on the top of what looked like a tennis ball under her skin and, as the girls applied pressure, a thick stream of pea-green puss and blood shot out. The girl’s friends gathered leaves to try and gather up the puss as it gushed out in a heavy stream. The poor girl squatted and screamed in pain. I almost threw up. When Thais talk about boils they do not mean spots.

The girl with the boil on her neck came to me three times a day for over a week and I gave her my antibiotics. She had no money and never received a visit. She was nicknamed ‘Boil on the Neck’. I was glad to give her something to help the infection, which did clear up eventually.

Illegal drugs were available in LardYao but were not as common as most people imagine simply because they were expensive.The guards made a lot of money bringing masses of things like snuff

into the prison, buying bags of it outside at four baht per bag and selling it in the prison for anything up to
1
,
000
baht.There were few women who could afford to pay the high prices for snuff, never mind anything else, so drug-taking was at a surprising

minimum.

As I mentioned earlier, in July
1996
, Patricia Hussain was away from Lard Yao for five weeks. Before she left, she received a letter

from England telling her that her seven-year-old son had been ‘collected’ from school by two men and driven around Manchester for a few hours before being brought home.This was someone’s way of telling Patricia that if she went ahead and testi- fied against the drug barons, they had access to her son, so she should think twice about what she was planning to do. She went anyway.

‘It’s not revenge, Sandra,’ she said.‘If any of those blokes had sent ten quid to my kids or even written to me after I was arrested I’d keep my mouth shut, but they acted as though they had never known me.’ Did
30
men go to prison for the sake of a tenner?

That’s how she made it sound.

In October
1996
the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh paid a state visit to King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit. Secretly, I hoped that the Queen would approach the King of Thailand in a way that no other person could and exert some influence on my case. All I wanted to do was go home. I would hopefully be able to transfer at the beginning of
1997
but I prayed for more than that. In dreams I saw myself being flown home on Her Majesty’s private plane. Her visit came and went and I remained where I was.

On my completion of the mandatory four years in Bangkok, a representative from the British Embassy came to the prison one day and asked me if I wanted to transfer home. Did I want to? What on earth did they think? Four years had finally gone by and I was desperate to get home.‘Yes, I definitely want to go!’ I really didn’t think I would get to this stage. Part of me believed I might be either dead or insane.Well, at least I wasn’t dead.

The woman brought a single form with her, rolled it into a tube and pushed it through the bars.‘Sign on the dotted line,’ she said, with a smile. It was the easiest thing I have ever done in my life. Quickly, I signed and she confirmed that my parents had sent over the money for my air ticket.‘The rest,’ she said,‘is just formalities.’

Under the terms of the prisoner exchange treaty between Thailand and Britain, prisoners with a sentence less than life are eligible to return to a British jail after serving four years in Thailand. Those serving life have to wait eight years. The same decision would apply if Thai prisoners were in jail in Britain; they would be able to apply for a transfer to Thailand, although no one had ever heard of a Thai prisoner transferring from the UK.

I was told I would probably have to serve half my remaining sentence before being eligible for parole.Tony Blair looked set to become the next Prime Minister and, under a Labour Government, I really didn’t believe they would make me serve half of the huge sentence remaining.
No
, I thought,
I’ll be OK once I get back on home soil
.

I had already seen Americans return home under transfer treaties and they were all released within just a few months of being transferred. Most European countries reduced the sentence upon transfer and even the Australians, who don’t have a treaty, support prisoner pardons, once the prisoner has served around the same time they would have been sentenced to had they been arrested in Australia.

The decision to send me home to finish my sentence was announced by the Thai Justice Ministry permanent secretary Kukiat Sunthornbura on
6
March. The move was essentially a humanitarian one,rather than being lenient towards drug offenders.

I had no idea how long it would take before I actually transferred, but I was ecstatic knowing that I would be leaving LardYao.

On
17
April
1997
, a Thai court granted me a transfer to Britain,

where I would serve the rest of my
25
-year sentence. I could not believe it. I was simply stunned. I would be transferring from Bangkok to Holloway Prison within the next eight to
10
weeks. Part of me still doubted if the day would actually arrive.

I was bursting inside. I was leaving this place, this horrible prison that had changed me so much.

*

At the beginning of May someone from the embassy told me that I would be leaving on
4
June. I sat and counted the days.‘Oh my God, that’s just five weeks to go.’

The embassy woman looked at me and smiled, but advised caution.‘It could be a long five weeks, Sandra,’ she said,‘so try to stay as calm about it as you can.’