'I just want to draw a line under Sandra Gregory the drug smuggler. Just be plain old Sandra Gregory'

During these past months we have been working on a book about her experiences as a prisoner in Thailand and the UK following her 25-year sentence for attempting to smuggle drugs from Thailand to Japan on February 6, 1993. It has been a rollercoaster of emotions, both highs and lows, where she has been sometimes eager to speak, other times very tense, but all the time desperate to convey the truth.

Throughout our encounter I was very

conscious of how much or how little she trusted me, particularly in the beginning. We met

following her release in August 2000 when I first interviewed her in Aberdeen a few days after she had been freed from Cookham Wood prison in Kent. It was a strained meeting as she tried to come to terms with her freedom and the cycle of almost a decade of self-inflicted mistrust.

A few days later I called her again at her

parents' home to fill in a few more details. ''Is this how it's going to be?'' she asked, ''everyone waiting to know about the old soldier telling the same old stories?'' I told her not to worry, that in a few weeks no one would want to know her (I was wrong). At the end of the conversation I asked the inevitable question: when will we see the book? ''Oh, God, everybody says that. I

don't know. I don't like delving into myself

over much.''

Yet this has proved impossible. For the best part of a year she was inundated with requests for interviews about what really happened in Thailand, most of which she declined. Instead, for months, she went round schools talking to students across the country about the drug dangers awaiting the unsuspecting, especially young travellers in their gap years. I had been to Thailand many years earlier and Sandra's story had had a specific resonance when I spoke with her. I called her again and we arranged to meet.

On a cold, sunny May morning I travelled for the first time to her home to discuss the possibility of working together. After four-and-a-half years in the notorious Klong Prem prison

in Bangkok and her repatriation, she was

pardoned by the King of Thailand after serving a third of that time. Almost a year had passed since she had been freed. We began working together on a whim. She didn't have any epiphany, she didn't turn to Jesus but blamed her decision to work with me on the fact I got on well with her kitten. We had been sitting discussing her imprisonment when she handed me the little mite to see how I would react. ''If you had shoved it away or ignored it there would have been no book,'' she said. ''That would have been it.'' I had passed my first test.

More than ten months ago I began a series of interviews with her and even when I got to know her it was almost impossible to dispel the notion that I was being judged, that if I broke her trust - in much the same way as Robert Lock (the man she alleges asked her to smuggle heroin, for (pounds) 1,000) and countless others in numerous prisons did - the book project would end, no matter how far along the line we were. ''In prison you don't trust anybody,'' she told me, ''that's rule number one. Don't tell anybody anything unless you want the whole prison to know about it.''

It even took a while for her to admit she had used drugs before, albeit as a youngster. On one occasion when she was 17 she went to Amsterdam with a friend. On her way home, at the customs checkpoint at the ferry dock, it dawned on her she had a piece of hash in her pocket that she had been using during her trip. She began to panic. A minute later someone touched her on the shoulder. A young American who she had never seen before was standing beside her. ''Whatever you've got give it to me,'' he said. She denied, of course, having anything but the stranger insisted. ''Listen, I can see you've got something, and if I can see it, they can see it, so give it to me and I'll take it through for you.''

She looked at him for a minute then took the tiny piece of hash from her pocket and handed it to him. He pocketed it and walked straight through. ''Keep it,'' she said, when they had both passed through the Nothing to Declare section. ''I should have known then that I would never make a drug smuggler, but I just couldn't read the signs.'' I remember there was a moment of dead silence. She sighed heavily, recoiling as if she'd been struck by a branding iron. She feared that this admission would almost make her twice as guilty.

Roughly a year ago, in Durham, in a small room where she was studying for an English qualification at the language department of Durham University, Sandra recounted this story to me. ''I don't want people to get the wrong impression,'' she said, ''but I would like to tell the truth.'' She felt guilty, probably more guilt than she needed. Her college accommodation was a short walk away from the maximum security Durham prison where she had spent over a year as an inmate following her repatriation to the UK in 1997. It was a sobering experience listening to her insecurities, and the haunting recounting of many of the stories that had led her to make the decision that would change, ultimately, her life for good. After her confession she sighed again. ''I'm really not sure if we should be doing this.''

On the day of our initial meeting Sandra was dedicated to the idea that if she were going to say anything at all she must insist she was not looking for sympathy. She spoke rapidly, a blitzkrieg of words about why this happened and why that happened and how she didn't want her book to read like an excuse, because she remained steadfast in her resolve that she was to blame for ending up in prison aged 27. She readily admitted she had agreed to carry drugs out of Thailand for the price of an air ticket home to her parents, Stan and Doreen. At the time she was suffering from amoebic dysentery, she had little money and was desperately homesick in a foreign country, and her niece had been born

at home with slight physical imperfections. Unwilling to burden her brother and her

parents with her own problems by asking for money to return to the UK she decided, finally, to take a risk by smuggling drugs. ''I don't have a real excuse. There were a few factors that might have pushed me in that direction, and I still find it hard to believe that I agreed to it, but I accept the blame and that has to be clear in the book. I want the book to be a reminder to others not to be as stupid as I was.''

For the next eight months I was perpetually interested in everything about her life, listening to her as she embarked on a journey of introspection, recollection and reflection of tales of punishment and retribution, brutality and dark, dark depressions. ''I was always truthful but I was never always open,'' she reminded me. ''I was truthful about things I was prepared to talk about but openness and honesty are slightly different. In the beginning I felt it was a nightmare, like I was back in prison with no control again.''

The title of the book, Forget You Had A Daughter, comes from the letter she wrote to her parents after her arrest. ''What I have done is inexcusable,'' she writes, ''and above all else I knew better than to do what I did.'' Her past identity is gone, forged, ultimately, into a new one by the criminal system. ''I've not had one out here for a long time. I had one in prison. I knew who I was, what I was and my place in society there. I'm not quite sure what it is here. I was established, I suppose. As long as I was there I adapted but I never accepted and I never liked it. Now I just want to get on with my life, draw a line under Sandra Gregory the drug smuggler. Just be plain old Sandra Gregory.'' She may well get her wish. At 37 she begins a course in geography at Oxford University in September.

With the book complete, I returned to West Yorkshire earlier this month to catch up with

Sandra. Although we have spoken on the telephone almost every day over the months it took to put the manuscript together, we have seen less of each other since it was completed in January. Today she is both attractive and weary looking and, as usual, without make-up. While the spectre of wrongdoing hangs over Sandra - her rather taut and severe prison physique is almost impossible to shed - she remains defiantly upbeat.

What made her confessions easier was that, essentially, the book was written for her

parents. Like most parent-child relationships, regardless of age, there is little dialogue of real intimacy between them. ''I don't speak to my parents about issues,'' she says, ''but often when I am doing an interview I'm not giving it to that person but to my parents. In this book it's like that. Almost explaining things. I'm talking to them.'' In a more specific sense, she is talking to her father who led the charge for her release by campaigning vigorously on her behalf.

Sandra Mary Gregory was born in Gloucestershire, but grew up in Kent after her parents moved there when she was six months old. She grew up with her older brother in a middle-class family where ballet, French and pony lessons prevailed. As a teenager she found herself increasingly at odds with her father and came of age in the grip of teenage rebellion. ''He understood me no better than I understood him.''

Their relationship had been a fraught one due, she insists, to the fact that they were both as stubborn as each other. From an early age she rebelled against her father culminating in an episode,

during her early teens, when she stayed out until early in the morning with a much older, teenage boyfriend. Upon her arrival home she discovered the door locks had been changed. A figure in a black dressing gown walked slowly down the stairs, then the door opened. She prayed it was her mum. ''You've got to have the last laugh, Sandra,'' said her father, with all the wrath of a biblical patriarch. He grabbed hold of her and punched her straight in the face. ''It was a strange moment,'' she recalls. ''I was hurt, shocked, embarrassed and humiliated. Although I thought him the most stubborn person I had ever known - even his pauses could last an hour - he was right; I always did have to have the last laugh.''

It was a difficult episode to recount and because it could almost have painted a wrong impression of Stan Gregory who, by the end of Sandra's imprisonment, had proven to be more saviour than tormentor. The transformation from biblical patriarch to scourge of the British Foreign Office was all the more remarkable for it. Her parents had campaigned for a reduction in her sentence. Recounting her tales, many of them about her childhood, there was almost a Hitchcockian tension in her voice. ''I'm talking to him through the pages of the book. I'm talking to my parents and telling them I'm blessed to have you as parents. You can't say those things directly. Working on the book was not for Joe Public to approve, it was for my parents.''

One of the more poignant episodes in the book happened shortly after she was arrested. While on remand for three years in the Klong Prem prison (which was the size of a football pitch and housed 3,000 women, with up to 70 inmates in a cell, washing in open sewers), she was visited by her parents. It was a traumatic time. Their initial reunion was cut short after media intrusion and they were told to return in a few days. Meanwhile Sandra was put in the prison hospital with a stomach complaint. Through exposure to too much sun or ill-health she imagined that her father was going to hatch an escape plan in a helicopter to get her out of prison. For three days, while they visited, she expected him to reveal his secret.

On the Wednesday everything had changed. Her parents were leaving. Their local news-paper had printed that they were visiting her in Thailand and published a picture of the house with a massive valuation. They were subsequently burgled. Sandra later discovered her mother's prescious engagement ring had been stolen. They were both extremely upset, telling her they were going home to deal with this mess ''that we wouldn't have had if it hadn't been for you. So you deal with your problems and we'll deal with ours.'' After the visit Sandra didn't see her father for another five years.

When we first met I could see her running more serious things over in her mind as she spoke, and I had the feeling she knew I would never quite be able to understand what had

happened to her. From punishment blocks to gothic mood swings and bouts of depression, this former teacher had learned a new language. For some weeks she skirted back and forward around subjects offering a little information without opening up. Yet here I was, asking for details, some of them intimate, and giving little or nothing in return apart from my desire to

listen. Our meetings or calls or e-mails involved tense truths, miserable silences, occasional insults, laughter and the occasional tear. When I remind her of this, she says ''I don't do tears''.

Durham was, perhaps, a watershed. We went for a walk around the prison walls and, from afar, she pointed up to one of the windows telling me that, many times, herself and other inmates would look out and dream of freedom. On that particular day there was a real sense she was no longer a prisoner; no one was screaming orders. ''I wouldn't have walked there,'' she admitted, ''if you hadn't been there. I wouldn't have gone into that little pub.'' There was a pub in the village where many of the officers went. ''It was all right because I had a bit of Dutch courage. We didn't know each other at all in the beginning but it worked out.''

A short time later we headed back to her room and began the long process of dissecting everything that happened over the previous decade and more. Gradually, Sandra revealed more and more details of particular events and episodes and eventually we did come to an understanding. I'd like to think it was my interview technique but I suspect it was the vodka and orange. Whatever the reason she decided to unburden a secret that she had managed to keep to herself for a few years. While in Durham prison she developed a relationship with a security-cleared male member of staff. Over a period of months their relationship, although not her intention, became sexual giving her a certain sense of empowerment over the prison system and those who had locked her away.

''Durham was awful and the only place where I wasn't pointed out to people as someone who was in a bad way. Every other place the women would say 'things could be worse, you could have 25 years hanging over you like Sandra

Gregory'. It was a tough place. There was very little you could laugh about and some of the

people were dreadful. I would be eating with them barely able to believe what they had done. Rose West is probably the name most people associate with Durham, but she was definitely not the worst. There were a lot of freaky people in there, let's put it that way.''

Generalisations were fine, but a prisoner must live by his or her wits and, in prison, loose talk can be dangerous, sometimes fatal. This episode was one which nearly never made the book. No sooner had she told me did she regret it, insisting that it shouldn't appear in case

people got the wrong impression of her time inside. ''I've had church groups, prayer groups, MPs, MSPs, bishops, archbishops and friends who supported me. I don't want them to be

disappointed and imagine that I was in prison having relationships all the time.''

Reluctantly she told me more. I was intrigued by the fact that she had allowed someone into her life who was part of the system that was holding her. With some tension in her voice she explained that there are many consequences of putting women in cells, under strict supervision and even stricter control of their movements. Everything in their life becomes dependent on others - often a male warden - and that is difficult to come to terms with. The self-esteem of women is reduced to almost zero and their natural spirit of independence is usurped. What they crave is to put some degree of control back in their lives.

''It certainly wasn't planned but I had a good idea what the consequences would have been if we had been found out.'' The point of the incident was not to highlight the fact that she had sex - and that other prisoners did as well, many with guards - but to emphasise how completely alienated, dependant and insecure many prisoners feel. Sex was simply a way of having something of her own. In the middle of the highest security prison in England, one that had undergone millions of pounds worth of security improvements, she had a secret. And secrets were greater currency than drugs or money. ''I felt real again.''

The relationship continued for five months and, at one point, Sandra believed she was pregnant. Much to the relief of both, her fears proved unfounded and the idea of continuing to see each other seemed ludicrous, although she did not regret the relationship. ''We saw less and less of each other until we stopped seeing each other alone together. Durham was such a difficult, horrendous place to be in that I needed something to remind me of the real world. Even now it's hard to believe it happened. But it did and, looking back, I wonder whether perhaps, in some small way, Chris [not his real name] saved my life. Or at least my sanity.''

Throughout her prison term there were times when she might have chosen death as an alternative to imprisonment. She contemplated it a number of times and would have considered, in the beginning, the death penalty as an option if it had been available. Although she is glad now she didn't have that option, there were times when it would have been easier for her to go down that route. Yet, for all this, she is not embittered towards the Thai authorities and the conditions they forced her to endure which were, in the main, horrendous. ''I broke the law. It was me and I'm not making excuses for this behaviour. I just felt the punishment was too excessive for the crime.''

And Robert Lock? He was freed after having been acquitted of drug smuggling. In June, 1998 she learned, via a newspaper report, that Lock had appeared before magistrates at Cambridge and pleaded guilty to possession of heroin. He was fined (pounds) 100 and ordered to pay (pounds) 69 costs. Lock, who represented himself in court, said, ''I am sorry for any trouble I have caused. It was a one-off affair.''

In many quarters there has been resentment over Sandra's early release and, similarly, a great deal of scepticism about her decision to write a book. Her reaction to this has always remained fairly stoic and accepting although, I suspect, there is still a degree of hurt that some people are unwilling to see beyond her crime. ''They're probably right. Doing the book was never intended to exonerate me from my past only to illuminate some of the reasons and perhaps prevent someone else making such a stupid mistake as myself.'' Forgiveness tends to balance its payments and receipts over a long period of time. I think she might have earned it. n

Forget You Had A Daughter,

by Sandra Gregory and

Michael Tierney, is published

by Vision at (pounds) 16.99. For further information, contact www.visionpaperbacks.co.uk

Doing Time

November 1990: Sandra Gregory leaves for a two-month trip to Thailand. She stays for two years before becoming ill; she is also penniless and desperate to return home. She claims she was offered (pounds) 1,000 by an acquaintance, Robert Lock, to smuggle heroin to Japan. February 9, 1993: Gregory and Lock are arrested at Bangkok airport and drugs are found on Gregory. They spend the next three years on remand while awaiting trial.

February 28, 1996: The Thai Criminal Court sentences Gregory to 25 years in prison for trafficking. Lock is acquitted.

June 4, 1997: Gregory is deported from Thailand to the UK following a transfer agreement between the two countries and the following three years are spent in Holloway, Foston Hall, Durham and Cookham Wood. In Durham she is placed alongside Rosemary West and many other high-security-risk female prisoners.

July 21, 2000: At around 2pm, Gregory leaves Cookham Wood Prison, after serving seven-and-a-half years of her 25-year sentence. At the time of her release, 1,293 Britons are being held in foreign prisons in 76 countries. More than half of all offences committed

by British inmates abroad are drugs-related.