Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton by Sandra Gregory

Author:Sandra Gregory [Gregory, Sandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, General, Social Science, Criminology, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781782196471
Google: h1NlAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: John Blake Publishing, Limited
Published: 2013-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

Working in the laundry, scrubbing the clothes of the officers and their families had left my feet in a terrible condition.The officers brought their washing every morning and we had to wash it, dry it and have it ironed and bagged up by 4.00 pm that same day. I developed huge boils and infections across my feet and legs that looked like moon craters and the constant exposure to dirty water was having a terrible effect on the healing process. I left when I could no longer take the pain and began working in the bakery.At least it was dry.

No one working in the laundry was allowed to keep a cat because we worked with the officers’ clothes and to send out a bag of clothes with cat hair on it would have been to invite a punish- ment. No sooner had I started in the bakery than I adopted a

young tomcat by the name of Jow-Son. Before long my cat became the most important thing in my prison world.

Family and friends in Britain would write asking if there was anything I would like sending from home. It was never as simple as that.Anything I might have liked would never have been allowed into Lard Yao, and anything that was allowed I didn’t really want anyway.While I thanked people for their kind offers, I told them I needed nothing.That changed when I realised that feeding Jow- Son was going to be a problem. (The rats in Lard-Yao were far too big for the cats to catch.)

While other prisoners received bottles of perfume, make-up and underwear – most of it to give to the guards as bribes or for dealing with the black market – I requested boxes of cat food from home.

One morning, out of nowhere, a beautiful, reddish-brown cat appeared and was immediately adopted by the Thai sweet factory girls.This cat was the biggest domestic feline I have ever seen. He must have escaped from Bangkok Zoo, I thought, because he just didn’t look normal. I nicknamed him Brutus.

After a few weeks Brutus started terrorising all the other tomcats, and often we would come out in the morning to find a fearful tom clinging to the top of a fence with smelly, brown liquid pouring down the wall beneath it. The bakery cats developed infections all over their hind legs from where Brutus had brutally and systematically attacked them all night.

Soon Jow-Son was howling when I picked him up, his infec- tions bursting out over my shirt, leaving me covered in green slime from his wounded legs. Over and over Brutus attacked the male cats. It seemed almost unnatural. Brutus refused to allow the other toms peace. Even the kittens born following his arrival all bore an uncanny resemblance to Brutus. Working late one night in the bakery, I saw him strutting inside.‘That’s it,’ I thought,‘I’ve had it.’ I could no longer sit back and watch this creature terrorise all our babies.

I picked him up and shoved him in a rice sack.

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