Extract from A Secret History of the Bangkok Hilton

The following is an extract from A Secret History of the Bangkok Hilton by Chavoret Jaruboon with Pornchai Sereemongkonpol, which was published last month.

To Thai minds, the Bangkok Hilton is a place of gloom and danger. Years later, I found out that working there was a risky business for those who lacked moral courage as there were plenty of opportunities to be corrupt.
Life gradually introduced me to good and evil until I realised how grey the world actually is and always will be. This is especially true in Thailand, where many things are ‘flexible’ or ‘compromised’ and a blind eye can be turned when money is paid or power is exercised. A lot of things in Thailand don’t always work the way they should.
Once as my father and I were on our way to visit my uncle, we came across a team of barefoot prisoners in their tattered brown uniforms cleaning the sun-parched road. I couldn’t imagine how thick their soles must be to endure the heat of the ground. They had been brought out of the prison for a few hours to labour under the glaring midday blaze.
The practice of prisoners performing public service can be traced back hundreds of years and continues to this day. During the early days of Rattanakosin, Thailand’s current era, they contributed to the kingdom by building canals, roads and railroads among other public structures. In fact, the Bangkok Hilton was built in part with prison labour.
During World War I, the Corrections Department transferred 200 prisoners from Bang Kwang Prison to a temporary camp in the Bang Khen area and ordered them to grow rice and raise livestock to be sold cheaply to law-abiding citizens. At that time, Thailand was suffering economically and such commodities were scarce.
The practice was revised in 1980 and a set of rules was introduced. Convicts are entitled to reductions in their sentences equal to the number of days they have performed public service and, on some occasions, a small wage.
The intention is to remind people that prisoners are not outcasts but are still part of society and that they can contribute towards the common good. Personally I don’t think it really influences Thai attitudes towards inmates. In fact, this arrangement has backfired a few times as prisoners have attempted to escape.
As a boy, I saw the convicts as bogeymen rather than outcasts. At that first close encounter, they were figures to be feared. Yet I could hardly take my eyes off them. This left a lasting impression on me. The difference between then and now is that I’ve adopted a more realistic attitude.
The scraping sounds the ankle shackles made as they struggled to walk and work further drew my attention to them. One inmate had covered his swarthy body with tattoos of tigers, Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, and occult writing. The prisoners derived great feelings of support and protection from these. They did so, perhaps, because there wasn’t much else for them to hold on to. One could easily wonder why, if the inked symbols possessed any power, those men had ended up in jail.

The writer in the mirror

Writing Hell in Barbados was quite traumatic for me. It gave me the long-awaited opportunity to tell my side of the story in some of the many scenarios I have been through. Certain things were truncated, though- for instance, I would have liked more of the original text I wrote about my time in Afghanistan, to have been included, such as what happened in the refugee camp I ended up stuck in for six months, penniless, swatting against the clouds of flies by day and the mosquitoes by night. But we wanted to get into the story re Barbados sooner, and thus certain ‘streamlinings’ were necessary. The text, as it transpired, was a lot less cumbersome and more aerodynamic than when it started.
It brought back a lot of memories, some painful, some long buried in my memory, some happy. People I had almost forgotten about, those I had loved and lost, for instance, but whose presences seemed to return like homing pigeons for the writing of this book. This book gave me the chance to seriously review some of the events I have been through- and realise their influence upon me. It was an incredibly cathartic experience, and I am now preparing further writing for Maverick House re my experiences as a ‘Down and Out in London’- as a former crack and heroin addict, living amongst the junkies, whores, pimps, dealers, et al of the dark underbelly of London Town, especially in and around north London’s King’s Cross area.
All of which marks a change in the kind of thing I have written about in the past. Back around the 1990s I wrote a series of books for a combination of American and British publishers on folklore, the tarot, magic spells, the Lord of the Rings, and dragons, in particular, ‘Step by Step Tarot’ by HarperCollins (circa 1992), ‘The Dragon Tarot deck and book set’( U.S. Games Systems Inc. 1993), and ‘The Lord of the Rings Tarot deck and book set’( U.S. Games, 1994). - Terence Donaldson, author.