Bridget Jones stole my story
Daily Telegraph - 10 November 2004 Sandra Gregory, who spent four years in a Bangkok jail for smuggling heroin, believes her ordeal inspired scenes in the new film The Edge of Reason. Here she tells how she felt when she watched it. Bridget
Jones is an ordinary woman. She is not glamorous, confident, skinny or
highly successful, and for this I have always adored her. I have giggled through the first Bridget Jones film countless times. Yet I sat down to watch an early screening of the sequel, which opens this week, feeling a little irritated. I expected to become more annoyed as the film unfolded. You
see, its author Helen Fielding knows my parents' next-door neighbours.
And, throughout my imprisonment in the infamous "Bangkok Hilton" - where
I was sentenced to 25 years for trying to smuggle heroin out of Thailand
- Helen was at dinner parties where my fate inevitably came up in
conversation. So,
when I first heard that Bridget is duped into carrying cocaine through
customs and ends up in a Bangkok women's prison in Fielding's second
novel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, I couldn't help wondering
whether she had been inspired by what happened to me. And, if so, how
could she turn my situation into comedy? It
was a mockery of what I had been through in Lard Yao, the women's
division of Klong Prem prison, and what many women continue to go
through. The audacity of it! I am sure she would have never written a "funny"
scene showing the hapless Bridget in a hospice or concentration camp.
Yet it was somehow acceptable to send up a bunch of women in prison. I
never bothered reading the book. And, last week, I went along to the
cinema pen in hand, so that I could take notes and write a letter of
disgust afterwards. From the moment the film started, however, as
Bridget parachuted into a ton of pigswill, I was hooked. In spite of
myself, I loved it. Even
the scene I had been dreading, where Bridget is arrested at Bangkok
airport, didn't seem trite. Far from it. It contained a subtle warning:
bad things don't, unfortunately, always happen to someone else. Although
it is more than a decade since I was arrested, watching the same thing
happen to Fielding's heroine was unexpectedly emotional. I felt myself
going cold and, in an instant, I was back there. Suddenly
I was 27 again, surrounded by hostile airport guards. I could smell Lard
Yao again. I could see the prison loos, where you had to squat in full
view of everyone, and the 26ft square room I slept in with more than 190
women. At one point, I was in tears. Other
episodes were realistic in ways you might not imagine. All the actresses
playing the prisoners wear plenty of well-judged make-up, and look
decorative, even in their prison uniforms. Not everyone's idea of an
oppressed inmate, in other words. Well,
the women I spent four-and-a-half years of my life with did put on
plenty of slap. At first, I was astonished, considering that there were
no men around. But then I realised it was all about maintaining
self-esteem, no matter how bleak the surroundings. Of
course, our stories aren't exactly the same. In the film, Bridget is
innocent and has no idea she is carrying drugs. I was not. But this was
what had happened to many of the women I met in Lard Yao. The
good-looking cad that Bridget's friend, Shazza, meets on the plane out
to Thailand - who later gives her a parting gift filled with cocaine -
is not without basis in reality. All the women I met in prison who had
not realised that they were carrying bags of drugs had been set up by
guys they knew.
Many
had been in love with, or even pregnant by, the men who had filled the
bottom of their suitcases with heroin. None of them, though, had a
lovely human rights lawyer (Colin Firth) doing his utmost to free them.
Bridget is lucky. But Bridget is a fictitious character in a romantic
comedy. In the real world, most of these women never go home. Admittedly,
there were some cringe-making moments. At one point, Bridget rouses the
troops by teaching them Madonna's Like a Virgin. The room goes wild;
everyone seems to forget that they're banged up for life in one of the
worst prisons on earth. It struck me as a bit callous. Yet
I suppose there were funny moments, even in Lard Yao. I never saw anyone
singing Madonna songs, and I suspect the guards would have broken up a
girly gathering because too much fun was considered "detrimental to the
running of the prison". Jokes
were usually at the expense of the guards. One evening a prisoner
managed to steal a set of keys and threw them over the wall. The guards
weren't just worried about escapes: they knew their superiors would be
furious. We,
obviously, found the episode hilarious. Especially when a guard from the
men's prison came to the main gate, nonchalantly asking if anyone had
lost anything. More
often than not, though, laughter was simply a means of dealing with the
awful conditions and being separated from family and friends. Women who
never see their children rarely laugh out of genuine happiness. One
of the only women I knew who was allowed to sing in Lard Yao was the "Coconut
Tree Nutter". She had a shaven head and demented grin. At other times,
she sobbed like a five-year-old. I was never sure why she sobbed and was
baffled as to what she found to amuse her so under the coconut tree. Every
morning she would dash out to her tree and hug it, demanding to know why
it had not grown in the night. She would spend each day under the tree,
singing at the top of her voice to the tree and anybody walking by. I
never found out why she was in Lard Yao, but she was one of the lucky
ones because she seemed mostly happy and she had a release date. When it
arrived, however, nobody came to collect her. So the Tree Woman
remained, no longer an inmate, but not deemed fit for release either. After
four-and-a-half years in Lard Yao, in 1997, I was lucky enough to be
transferred to Holloway in London. Three years later, after receiving an
unexpected pardon from the King of Thailand, I was freed. So
what about the women I left behind? Most are still there, many have died
and many will remain there until they die. They will not be forgiven or
paroled and their sentences will not be reduced. In the film, Bridget's goodbye gifts to her fellow inmates - books, bars of chocolate and bundles of underwear - are received with grateful cheers. And this really did make me cringe. Watching someone else walk free was never made easier by being given a nice new bra. No one who hasn't been there can know the misery of being left in Lard Yao. |