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HAUNTED by the 'HILTON'

David Wilson

'YOU'RE GOING TO think I'm really stupid,' grins Sandra Gregory, standing at her local railway station. Gregory then gleefully explains that she has spotted a pile of coins on the track. After the train has pushed off, the 38-year-old awkwardly clambers down and gathers them.

This first glimpse of the headline- grabbing former drug smuggler, based at Sowerby Bridge near Leeds in the north of England, intriguingly suggests she has yet to mellow. Gregory just pleads poverty, saying she needs every penny because she is a poor student and only makes 10p on each sold copy of her recently published prison memoir Forget You Had A Daughter (Vision Paperbacks).

The cottage where she lives turns out to be tall but too cramped for Gregory's meagre selection of furniture and her own animated presence. A chatterer, she freely admits that she is tricky to communicate with because she deviates, her mind racing ahead of her, which rings true. One moment she is analysing herself, the next she is drooling over the thought of Braveheart-style men in kilts and the next bewailing the state of the environment.

The fateful detour destined to plunge this daughter of an engineer and a nurse into torment was an eight-week holiday in Thailand at the end of 1990. Seduced by the cheap but sensuous lifestyle, she wound up staying for two years, working as a teacher, before she fell ill with fever, ran out of money and decided to try to get home in 1993.

Gregory advanced no further than Bangkok airport. There customs pounced and found a bag containing 90 grams of heroin (the weight of a small tube of toothpaste) which she had inserted in her vagina for a $12,000 payment offered by an alleged British dealer called Robert Lock.

Pleading innocence, Lock got off. Gregory was originally sentenced to death. But the court commuted the sentence to a 25-year jail term because she did not try to sell a story.

Gregory served almost five years in Thailand's infamous Lard Yao prison, dubbed the 'Bangkok Hilton', largely living on maggot-infested rice, before she was moved to a British prison in 1997. Three years later, after a surprise pardon from the king of Thailand, she walked free 18 years early.

She then worked with prison-reform groups and lectured about her ordeal to young people in schools, fervently trying to persuade the scruffy ones with their shirts hanging out who reminded Gregory of herself not to dabble in smuggling. Last year, to relieve a sense of failure stemming from the fact that everyone she knew was a graduate except herself, she began a geography degree course at Oxford, spawning more headlines about a jailbird made good.

She admits she is sick of speaking to the press. But is she penitent?

Rather pat, she says: 'It was bad, and I shouldn't have done it. I knew better than to do it and I did it anyway. I tried to justify it in my mind, but I shouldn't have.'

Other prisoners laughed about her crime, however, since the amount of 'pong', as they called it, was so small. Gregory explains that the authorities came down so hard on her simply because 'that was the law': carrying more than 20 grams meant a mandatory minimum 25-year sentence.

Shedding light on the thinking behind the sentence, she says that in the eyes of Thai society she had committed a crime against humanity, 'Meaning I was worse than a murderer or serial killer.'

Gregory says she finds this judgment 'sweeping' and portrays herself as an essentially honest if wild individual who slipped up catastrophically once.

She adds that she used to be naive and gullible. Her mother, who campaigned for her daughter's release, would say: 'Oh God, Sandra, anyone with a sob story - any duck with a broken wing and you bring it home,' Gregory recalls.

At the same time, the survivor says that she has toughened and that she is usually less than sympathetic towards friends who voice their existential anxieties: 'If somebody has got a problem, it usually doesn't equate as a problem to me because I know what other people's problems really can be like.'

Warming to the subject, she says that when friends whinge and feel sorry for themselves, she has no time for them. She tells them to stop moaning because they usually have a house, enough food and money to pay the bills.

And how do they react?

'They say that I am a hard-faced cow,' she replies, cackling. Other women who stayed at the horror Hilton during Gregory's stint may agree, in the light of her ability to beat up all-comers.

Gregory was involved in so many fights that she can't recall her first. 'I can't remember if it was the Nigerian or French girl or the Vietnamese or the Thai girl,' she says.

But she does vaguely remember how the first fight began: Gregory challenged a woman who was supposedly provoking her to settle the score with blows.

When her tormentor accepted, Gregory felt she had no choice but to attack. 'I thought I am going to hit her before she hits me because she's bloody huge, and she's going to kill me but I am going to have a go at her,' Gregory says.

She admits that she went over the top: 'I just wanted to see blood, I just wanted to kill, and I thought I just cannot stop hitting this person. I was just pounding on this girl's face, thinking, 'I am going to kill her, and I am more than happy to kill her, and I don't know where this is coming from but it is coming.' And every time I punched this girl in the face I thought I am just going to punch her one more time.'

Despite such violent outbreaks, Gregory insists that she is not hard. Suddenly sounding strangely like a beauty contestant, she says she gets on well with children and animals, adding that they are quite a good judge of character.

In an attempt to pinpoint what kind of person she is, she says: 'I am a pretty decent person in that I don't lie, I don't cheat, I don't steal. I am not a greedy person.'

Nor is she unhappy. True, she sometimes gripes but then, she says, becoming Saint Sandra, she reminds herself to be pleased with the things she has rather than fret about those she lacks.

'You know, I think, God, I would love to have a bigger house. I wish I could afford a car. I wish that I could afford a holiday in the sun every year. But then I think, 'I've got so much. Why on earth am I wishing that I had got more when I have got so much?''

Her blessings include her significant other, the composer Andy Garbi whom she describes in her book as 'the man I have been waiting for all my life' and the subject she is reading at Oxford. Gregory raves about geography, describing it as 'the only subject there is. There is no other subject. Why study anything else?' On a roll, she elaborates: 'Geography is the physical, it's the social, it's the environmental. Geography is the philosophy of man's environment,' she concludes then worriedly wonders who originally came up with that last line. She stumbles, swears and, her face darkening, complains that, at Oxford, students are meant to retain that kind of information. She admits she is finding her course 'hugely challenging'.

Ditto memories of her Bangkok nightmare. She still thinks about prison every day and appears haunted or even unhinged by the arrest that preceded it. Recently, Gregory reveals, she and her boyfriend went to a concert, with three cans of beer illicitly stowed in Garbi's rucksack. When a bouncer asked if the bag contained any alcohol, Gregory panicked and immediately came clean, her heart thumping. Still sounding manic about the incident, she bangs her chest in imitation of her heartbeat then deviates to another of her demons - a police station at the bottom of the road.

'Every time they go past, I know they are looking at this house,' she says. 'I know they are looking at me. Every time a policeman is walking down this street I know they are coming for me, and I just wait for the handcuffs.'

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