the seven year glitch In 1993 Sandra Gregory was found guilty of drug smuggling and sentenced to 25 years in a Bangkok prison. Now, finally, having been pardoned by the king of Thailand, she is trying desperately to reclaim her life

She doesn't really trust me. Her face is full of terrible doubts and I fully expect her to flee from the hotel. It would take, I imagine, a lot of work and a lot of focus to pretend to be this upset over a request for a photograph. Finally she relents. She's made up her mind, I think, that nothing unexpected is going to happen. No mystery here. There's a certain stiffness to her smile. In the room she sits at the edge of the bed, before bending forward and scooping her knees into the foetal position.

For whatever reason there is a faraway look in her eyes. I think she is still half expecting masked prison officers to come charging into the room and hose her from where she is sitting before beating her back to the cell from which she has recently been released.

''I've been in prison for more than seven years and now you want to take my picture in a hotel room. What am I supposed to think? I don't even know who you are.'' It's the small things that get her, the little, seemingly insignificant details, that she has to contend with. I give her a maudlin, self-pitying look, reflecting on the misery of travelling to Aberdeen on a Friday. She gives me a look back. You should try the Bangkok Hilton, I think she's saying. I can almost detect a smile.

Since being released from Cookham Wood prison in Rochester, Kent, two weeks ago, Gregory is finding it difficult to adjust to her new life on the outside. It is, I venture, understandable. We head back downstairs and she offers to open all the doors for me since that simple exercise was denied her following her capture for trying to smuggle 87g of heroin through Bangkok Airport on February 6, 1993. She was sentenced to 25 years in the notorious Klong Prem prison in Bangkok and was recently pardoned by the king of Thailand, after serving a third of that time (she was repatriated in 1997 to serve the remainder of her sentence in Britain, the third-longest sentence for a woman in Britain, after Rose West and Myra Hindley). Only now is she trying to break the cycle of almost a decade of self-inflicted mistrust.

When we sit down and order coffee she tells me she is not looking for sympathy. On the contrary. She is eager to point out that she was to blame for ending up in prison at 27. She agreed to carry drugs out of Thailand for the price of an air ticket home to her parents, Stan and Doreen. Originally from Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire, she left Britain on a backpacking holiday. Two years later when her money had run out and she was suffering from a tropical fever, she claimed that she accepted #1000 from a fellow Briton, Robert Lock, to smuggle heroin out of the country.

''I don't have an excuse. It's the opposite, in fact. It was simply down to me. I still find it hard to believe that I agreed to it. When I transferred to the British prisons I would hear about all the horrendous upbringings and childhoods from other prisoners. Stories that would just break your heart over and over and I'd sit there and say I had ballet lessons and pony lessons and extra French lessons. They'd just look at me and say: 'Oh my God, Sandra, what went wrong?' So what excuse have I got? None. I can't justify what I did at all.''

She thinks about this, her cycle of self-destruction. It's been an experience that has quickly informed her entire life. Something, somewhere, went wrong and every interaction she is having, or has had, is based on the information contained within that secret. To the point where she trusts almost no-one. It's her against the world. Her face is a concentration of images as she probes each question for a suitable answer. But she gives me a look that would be hard to describe as guilty.

We attempt to order lunch, which proves to be another small, but ultimately illuminating and hilarious, event in itself. She scans the menu, her eyes almost glazing over at the choice. ''I'm not used to this,'' she reveals, barely audibly. ''I'm used to the basics inside. Why don't we just go for something ordinary?'' Fine with me, I say. She pauses. ''Chips? We could share a bowl of chips. Is that okay?'' No amount of gold would sway her. ''And what about some sauces? Do they have chilli sauce?'' Her smile turns into a hearty laugh. Chips it is.

For some reason I expected tall and gangly, but she is a great deal smaller. Her very appearance - scrubbed and economic - is a constant reminder of the previous seven years. Her face, which is both attractive and dog-tired, is devoid of make-up, although there is a bit of the I've-been-eating-a jam-doughnut about her lipstick. She is wearing a dark shirt, mustard trousers and a pair of white running shoes. Her fingernails look recently polished, a small concession, perhaps, to mitigate the severity of her newly-acquired prison physique. She remains thin but defiantly robust and athletic. There is a two-inch scar on her left hand and the raised stitch marks are still evident. A prison confrontation? No, she's had that one for more than 20 years. Did you notice the others, she asks me. No, I didn't. ''Good.''

As she speaks you can see her running more serious things over in her mind and you cannot help but feel as if she knows you will never quite be able to understand what has happened to her. Gregory, a former teacher, has learned a whole new language. Bare cells, punishment blocks, prisoner protection, infringement of rules - sometimes serious, other times unfathomable - beatings, fights,

medical officers, governors and unbreakable chairs and beds.

The chips arrive and we both tuck in. It's been a strange seven-and-a-half years. If you fight, ultimately you lose. They just tie up your hand and leave you with the weaker one. Indeed, her release from prison, she tells me, has been difficult. Her identity, which has, ultimately, been forged by the criminal system, is gone. ''I don't have one out here. 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.'' She sighs. She looks tired. She takes another sip of coffee and a chip. ''As long as I was there I adapted but I never accepted and I never liked it.''

Coming out of prison has proven to be more of a shock than she had initially expected, although being at her parents' house in Aberdeenshire has made life slightly easier. It has given her a base, a place to collect her thoughts. The countryside here, she describes as being like Beatrix Potter land. ''It's a nice kind of shock, I suppose. My head is just getting used to being out here.

''There's no urgency about the days now, which is really nice. I can sit outside in the dark on my own which I love because you don't get the chance to be in the actual dark in prison. You can see the dark in prison but you don't get the chance to feel it.''

There is something irresistible about her stories and I am curious to see if she can confine herself to the prescribed topics. ''And I mustn't stop appreciating soft pillows. It would be really easy to forget just what it was like.''

She is sitting in a chair without a rocking facility but is moving backwards and forwards, perhaps unconsciously. I don't think she's nervous; it's more, I think, from a sense of not wanting to sit too long in the one place for fear the illusion of her freedom will shatter. She likes to go for walks early in the morning now before chatting with friends on the phone. It's a lovely feeling not having a time limit on calls. Last week she went for a swim with her mother in the local pool, her first time in about 10 years. For the past seven years it has been her mother's favourite place because it was the only spot where no-one could see her crying.

Her parents have campaigned relentlessly for a reduction in her 25-year sentence. One of the best feelings, she says, since her release, has been watching her mother and her father, who is a retired oil executive, doing ''ordinary things'' rather than campaigning on her behalf. She is on a little pink cloud for a while. ''It's great to look out of the window and see my dad mowing the lawn. When I was inside all they did was spend their time talking about me and trying to get me freed. That's all over now and they can get back to being themselves. I am indebted to them. They didn't bring me up to do anything like this.''

Throughout her prison term, she suffered varying degrees of depression and almost gothic mood swings. There were times when she might have chosen death as an option to imprisonment. Did she really consider suicide? ''Yes,'' she says, matter-of-factly. ''I considered it a number of times and would have considered, in the beginning, the death penalty as an option if it had been available. I'm glad I didn't have that option now, but there were times when it would have been easier for me to go down that route.''

Why exactly? ''Death as a concept comes in many different ways to people when you are in prison and it comes to everybody. Whether it's dying naturally, committing suicide, or being killed in prison or the death penalty.'' Is it difficult talking about it? ''At certain stages if someone had offered it to me I would have taken it. But I did not want to die in prison . . . but maybe it would have been easier. It's been a long seven years for me. And for my parents.'' Should the courts be allowed to impose the death penalty? Her eyes interrogate the room. ''Should one man be allowed to take another's life?''

Inevitably, she has changed. By her own admission, she has aged terribly. When she looks at newspaper pictures from her time in Thailand she thinks: ''My God, is this me?'' She hoped never to turn into an old jailbird but after she passed the five-year mark she looked at herself and realised she had turned into that. ''I'm hard-faced and cynical. It's terrible. I've become suspicious. I've learned not to trust people. That's what you learn in prisons. You sit and you watch and you learn.''

Yet, for all this, she is not embittered towards the Thai authorities and the conditions they forced her to endure. ''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.'' When we talk about the time leading up to her arrest she shrugs casually. She was homesick and in poor health physically. The mention of Robert Lock, who she alleged offered her #1000 to carry heroin out of Bangkok for him, barely raises an eyebrow. He denied the charges and was found not guilty. ''He didn't coerce me or manipulate me. Well, maybe he

did and I didn't realise that he could do that. I also don't like to think he was so very bad. I

don't have any feelings for him now. So I really don't like it when other people hate him. Good luck to him.''

It is said with some degree of conviction but she hangs back slightly, because her mind is not as robust as it once was. It's the inhibiting nature of fear, which can send a mind into hiding. There is almost a Hitchcockian tension in her telling of her experiences. She will talk about Bangkok till the cows come home. She was on remand for three years in the Klong Prem prison, which was the size of a football pitch and housed 3000 women, with up to 30 inmates in a cell. They washed in open sewers. How difficult was it?

''You do only remember the good bits. Even if you remember the bad bits you don't remember the feeling that went along with it, you just kind of remember the time you sat under the washing line and you broke your heart. But you can't remember the actual pain, the feeling that you felt at the time. There were times I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. I remember writing to my parents, on something equivalent to a piece of tissue, to tell them to forget all about their daughter. Sometimes it was insane.'' What you should try to imagine is this being said in a

voice that is lacking anger or defence, but

more neutrality. As if to betray too much

feeling was somehow to be branded a prison grass. Or something more decadent. A fool. Someone with weakness.

I talk in terms of hardening herself psychologically and she says you have to understand the psychological effects of reinventing yourself. ''You don't have a choice. But you don't pretend to yourself, it's your mind that pretends to you. You are not consciously doing it. Your mind is creating barriers to help you deal with it. It happened in all the prisons I was in. The instinct is to survive. Your mind just cushions it. You go into denial. But eventually you come out of it. I remember when it happened. There was a prison tannoy system that gave out messages in Thai every day. One day the tannoy played the Beatles White album and the spell

was broken. I just collapsed. The realisation smacked me in the face. Every prisoner has a variance of that.''

Upon her arrival in Britain she was put in Holloway and then Durham before finally going to Cookham Wood. ''Durham was awful. In Durham it's 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'. I hated being an example of how bad things could be. They were all serving life in Durham. It was a tough place.

''There was very little you could laugh about and some of the people there 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.'' Did you speak with her? ''Yes.'' How did you react to her? ''The problem there is that you're asking me about a specific inmate and I would hate to cause anybody, I don't care who they are, any more grief and heartache than they are already experiencing. So if I was to talk about a specific person it's likely they may see it and it's going to upset them. Even if I don't like the person, I don't want to go upsetting people, so I'm reluctant to answer. There were a lot of freaky people in there, let's put it that way.'' She dabs another chip into some mustard.

It's all about getting to the root of the thing, I suppose, though she is keen to avoid some of the details. Generalisations are fine, a broad sweep acceptable, but don't expect explicit details. It says a lot about human nature, about what we become in order to survive. She has, perhaps, had to act as if she were fearless, when, in fact, she is not fearless. ''I never cried in prison, at least not to anyone's faces.'' We get on to the subject of friends. Was there a boyfriend? ''Well,'' she smiles, ''what kind of bloke is going to sit around and wait seven years? I don't know any. The man of my dreams isn't really a priority, to be honest. If there's a nice one round, of course, that's fine.

''Life has taken on a different perspective. I never sat around thinking about relationships. Actually, as lot of people do, and even if they are in prison that side of their life does not go on hold, if you know what I mean. As regards my friends, the truth is I don't think I've got a lot in common with a lot of my old friends. The friends that were there before have all moved on and I'm not sure if we would just be pretending to be friends.'' She is planning to return home to West Yorkshire soon. She has a house there which she left in 1991. ''I have a friend, Mark, who's been looking after it for me. He doesn't question a thing. I am very blessed to know someone like that. I feel alright about the friends who have disappeared out of my life because I have disappeared out of theirs. I don't expect anything from anybody.''

In some quarters there has been resentment over Gregory's early release. How does she react to criticism from anti-drug campaigners that she has been, in some ways, glorified? There is a little confusion in her face and something approaching hurt. ''They're probably right. Since I've been out the phone's been non-stop, the media have been calling requesting interviews and photographs. Yes, I am being glorified, and I'm not sure why. People have suffered much more than me and I'm not trying to diminish what I did.''

I take some chips myself and we begin to chat again. There's been talk of getting involved in some kind of drug rehabilitation, but she is keen to go to university. ''If I thought I could have any impact on the drugs scene I'd have a go. But I don't assume that I can do anything more than those people who have already tried to do in the past and failed. I'd like to study environmental issues, maybe Third World development, agricultural policy, or policies for sustainable development in the future. I'm not sure what's on offer yet, or where exactly I'd go, but I'd like to give it a try.''

There is a wide-eyed, irreducible human innocence to Sandra Gregory that is wholly encompassing. There are criminals and there are those who have committed criminal acts. She found out the hard way that she fell into the latter category. And I can see how Gregory, a woman with a troubled past, might be worried about her future. But if prison is supposed to teach one thing - rehabilitation - then Gregory does not have far to travel.

A few days later I call her again at her parents' home and we fill in a few more details. Is this how it's going to be, she says, everyone waiting to know about the old soldier telling the same old stories. Don't worry about it, I say, a few weeks and no-one will want to know you. She feels like taking an advertisement out. 'No longer able to speak about her experiences.'

I ask 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.'' Given time to adjust I'm pretty sure she will.