When drug smuggler Sandra Gregory was jailed for 25 years for attempting to smuggle heroin out of Thailand, she didn't realise her time in a North-East prison would prove tougher than that in a primitive Thai jail. A tentative friendship with serial killer Rose West, a pregnancy scare and near suicide were among Gregory's experiences in Durham Prison, a place she said she'd prayed never to be taken. Amanda Brown reoprts.

SICK, broke and desperate to return home to Britain, Sandra Gregory made the worst decision of her life when she agreed to smuggle drugs out of Thailand. Arrested at Bangkok Airport with heroin hidden inside her body in 1993, she was sentenced to spend 25 years in prison for her crime.

Four and a half horrendous years in the notorious Lard Yao women's prison - dubbed the Bangkok Hilton - followed, before she was repatriated to serve the remainder of her sentence in Britain.

Gregory was 27 when she was jailed. The 25-year sentence threatened to rob her of her childbearing years. Instead, her ordeal ended two years ago, in July 2000, when she was pardoned by the King of Thailand and finally released from jail.

Now 37, Gregory is trying to rebuild her life and forget her "embarrassing and shameful" past, and has written a book, Forget You Ever Had A Daughter, about her experiences.

Gregory had been an antiques dealer in Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire, when she went on holiday to Thailand in 1990. She liked it so much she threw away her return ticket and looked for work. She found two jobs teaching English, developed a large circle of friends and was happy there for a couple of years - until she fell ill.

She developed dengue fever and amoebic dysentery, lost both her jobs and was desperate to go home.

But she had no money. So when a man approached her and offered her £1,000 to carry drugs out of the country, she says she felt it was an offer she couldn't afford to refuse. Gregory claims she was vulnerable because she was so desperate to get home. So she accepted the offer - and was arrested at Bangkok Airport with 89 grammes of heroin hidden inside her body in condoms.

She was charged with drug trafficking and pleaded guilty. Had she denied it and been convicted, she would have faced an automatic death sentence.

As it was, she found herself incarcerated in Lard Yao prison. Conditions were horrendous, with up to 170 women in each cell sleeping in rows on the floor between 6pm and 6am.

Gregory had 15 inches of floor to sleep on, head to head and side by side with other women, many of whom were insane. Lights were on all night and some prisoners had to 'sleep' sitting up or on the toilet. The rest of the time they were outside, trying to escape the heat of the blazing Thai sun.

After being transferred back to Britain in 1997, Gregory was initially sent to Holloway. Over the next three years she went to another three prisons, including the maximum security Durham jail, where she met serial killer Rose West, jailed for life in 1995 for the murder of ten girls and young women, including her daughter Heather and step-daughter Charmaine.

But despite the fact that it was closer to her family, it was not a longed-for transfer. As Gregory writes: "Since my arrival back in the UK, Durham was the one place I'd prayed never to be taken. Within the prison system, Durham is used as a threat to all the prisoners: 'We'll send you to Durham if you're not good' was the regular refrain to troublemakers.

"Durham had been my immediate allocation when I had first been transferred back to the UK because of the length of sentence I was serving but Governor Leonard in Holloway had blocked the proposed move. 'It's not for you, Sandra,' he said. 'Durham will kill someone like you'."

Gregory described Durham Prison, in a letter to her parents, as filled with "44 nutty-looking females". Durham's most notorious prisoners have included Myra Hindley and Victorian serial killer Mary Ann Cotton, as well as Rose West.

During Gregory's 15 months on Durham Prison's H Wing, she formed a friendship of sorts with West, first noticing the jail's most infamous prisoner as "she seemed to scuttle about the place, not walk, as if she was always making plans for something and her manner of walk helped keep her occupied The sight of her brought me out in a chill. I looked at her as she scuttled into a corner and decided never to speak to her."

But after a chance meeting in a prison queue, Gregory changed her mind.

"It didn't take me long to realise that, although Rose West was regarded by most people as the most abominable creature, from where I stood, she was not the worst by a long shot. She was never quite what I would call a friend but we did speak at length over a period of time.

ON Christmas morning, we were unlocked at 9.30am and, as I emerged onto the wing around ten, I looked around as plumes of smoke filtered across the landing. Rose West's cell had been set on fire and the blaze had developed ferociously."

Everything in West's cell, including her stereo and tapes and many frilly pillows and doilies she had made, were destroyed.

"Rose wasn't in her cell at the time of the fire but Jack, her beautiful blue and yellow budgie hadn't been so fortunate. Although he survived, he was covered in black soot, stunned and more than a little choked," says Gregory.

"I was amazed to discover Rose loved budgies. I hadn't imagined her capable of loving feelings but Rose doted on Jack. Sometimes he even sat on my shoulder and chewed my earring. Now he was black with smoke, trapped in someone else's fire inside a prison cell that held Rosemary West. After the fire, Rose gave Jack away. She was traumatised by the event and I actually felt quite sorry for her. She had nothing at all in there apart from that bird."

Another time, Gregory was surprised to see West, who had tortured and tormented so many, carefully turn a hot pan's handle inwards as any mother would do. And she listened in horror as West condemned her husband Fred's prison suicide, before he could be convicted of any of the 12 murders he was charged with, as the ultimate act of a psychopath.

"She (Rose West) was foaming at the mouth by now. This is what she did when she was excited. 'All their lives they're planning the ultimate murder... Their own. That's the ultimate murder for a psychopath. He planned all his life to kill himself. When it came down to it, he carried out the ultimate murder and hung himself. Not for me. For himself'."

Gregory also began a sexual relationship with a prison guard which culminated in a pregnancy scare and she became so depressed she spent time on suicide watch.

Gregory says, without a doubt, Durham was the worst prison she spent time in.

"Boredom drives prisoners to even more pornographic and degrading treatment of themselves and other prisoners. Prisoners suffered from emotional disturbance, uncontrollable crying and uncoordinated fury.

Simple things like gossip turned vicious with sometimes terrible consequences. There were frequent bouts of terrible self-mutilation; frenzied lesbian circles and violence were the norm.

"So many times I wished I had never been transferred back from Thailand. In Durham, there was such an impending sense of isolation and frustration, with virtually no control over my own life, that it caused great psychological hardship and proved virtually impossible to deal with.

"Durham was so much harder to endure than Bangkok... there were points in Durham when I felt I was on the verge of collapsing with insanity.

"It is very easy to criticise the Thai system of punishment but, in many ways, the system in Britain is worse than it is in Thailand. Sometimes this is easy to forget."

* Forget You Had A Daughter by Sandra Gregory is published by Vision, priced £16.99 and is available now.