Forget You Had a Daughter - Doing Time in the Bangkok Hilton Read Online Free PDF Page A

things.
    I don’t blame my parents for being the way they were with me, but I resented their lessons, and rebelled in any way I could.

    School was a waste of time and I grew accomplished at bunking off. I began to hate everything conventional. Although I was always impatient for learning, I never had the patience to sit and to be told. My preference was to learn by living, not studying in claustrophobic classrooms with teachers who, I imagined, had no idea of real life. I wanted to know, but I wanted to know now. I wanted to experience. Now.
    Claudio was 18 and I was 14 . Desperate to fulfil the cliché of our teenage infatuation we decided we were head over heels in love. My parents hated him. Claudio spoke little English and he worked in an Italian restaurant. And he had a motorbike and he smoked and he was different.
    Claudio finished work around midnight. I was supposed to be sleeping. My hormones had kicked in. I felt like an adult in a kid’s body.
    After a bath and my mum had plaited my hair into pigtails, I would pretend to go to sleep but once my parents had gone to bed I’d climb out the window and be gone until four or five in the morning. This went on for ages and I loved the excitement and freedom.
    Oh my God, I was petrified. I had arrived home one morning, to find the kitchen door locked and the front door bolted. My parents had done this on purpose. I rang the bell. I prayed it would be my mum.
    Please, please let it be Mum.
    A figure in a black dressing gown walked casually across the hall landing, and slowly down the stairs. I stood outside the door, shaking.The door opened.
    ‘You’ve always got to have the last laugh, Sandra,’ he said, with all the wrath of a biblical patriarch,‘haven’t you?’
    What happened next, I think, was done more in sadness than anger. He grabbed hold of me and punched me straight in the face. I’d never been hit before and the strength of the punch together with the shock of being hit sent me crashing back, and I sunk down the wall, collapsing in a heap. It was a strange moment. 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. Not surprisingly, our falling-out period continued.
    *
    ‘How would you feel about living in America?’ my mum asked me one day, after my dad had been offered a transfer.
    ‘America?Yeah!’ I was 15 years old. It sounded great. I’d love to
    live there.
    A short time later we were living in a wholesome little place called Sewickley Heights, just outside Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania. How wonderful , I thought, this is where Dracula lived .
    Sewickley smelled like giant hot-dogs and ketchup. For my parents it was a breath of apple-pie family values and we stayed here for two years. I loved it as well, though for entirely different reasons. There was beer, boyfriends, a strange school and those new things that my mum had always warned me about: drugs.All of these provided distractions that fitted perfectly with the way this wayward teenager felt; I wreaked havoc at QuakerValley High School. Before long I was as familiar with the American detention system as anyone else on campus.
    QuakerValley was my first real introduction to drugs, although I managed to resist initially. It was seen as kind of quaint that the little English girl refused them. I wanted to fit in. Physically it was impossible because all these amazing looking Americans, with their tanned skin and luminous hair, surrounded me. Slowly, I came round. I wanted to try the new things that others were
    doing.When I was 16 , I smoked a marijuana joint with a girl from
    school.
    I knew my parents wouldn’t approve but what did they know? How could they understand any of this? From smoking a joint I graduated to a little speed and later to acid. Everybody around me was doing it and, to be honest, I didn’t dislike what I was