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Terry Donaldson holds an honours degree ineconomics from the London School of Economics.Having practised the tarot for over 30 years, he haswritten books on the subject and hosted his own TVshow. He is also a practitioner of Bikram’s Yoga anda member of the Society of Authors and BritishMensa. He lives in London. For more informationabout the author, visit www.terrydonaldson.com.

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Hell inBarbados

THE TRUE STORY OF A MAN

IMPRISONED IN PARADISE

TERRY DONALDSON

Every effort has been made to contact the copyrightholders of material reproduced in this text. In cases wherethese efforts have been unsuccessful, the copyright holdersare asked to contact the publishers directly.

Some people named in this book have been givenpseudonyms to protect their privacy.

PUBLISHED BY MAVERICK HOUSE PUBLISHERS

First published in 2006. This edition published in 2008.

Maverick House, Office 19, Dunboyne Business Park,Dunboyne, Co. Meath, Ireland.Maverick House Asia, Level 41, United Center Tower, 323Silom Road, Bangrak, Bangkok, 10500, Thailand.

info@maverickhouse.comhttp://www.maverickhouse.com

ISBN: 1-905379-47-1 / 978-1-905379-47-7

Copyright for text © 2006 Terry Donaldson.

5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this book comes from wood pulp ofmanaged forests. For every tree felled, at least one tree isplanted, thereby renewing natural resources.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved.No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted inany form or by any means without written permissionfrom the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes toquote brief passages in connection with a review writtenfor insertion in a newspaper, magazine or broadcast.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from theBritish Library.

D E D I C AT I O N

DEDICATED TO ALL of the inmates of Glendairy Prison;past, present, and future.

AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

I WOULD LIKE to thank Carson Cadogan of Eagle Hall,Barbados, Roxanne Gibbs of the Barbadian newspaperNation, and The Barbados Advocate, for permission touse their photographs in this book.

I would also like to thank Kay Danes of www.foreignprisoners.com for her invaluable help inbringing the focus of international attention to thecondition of those suffering in Glendairy Prison,Barbados.

P R O L O G U E

WHAT SPRINGS TO mind when you think of Barbados?Is it the warm tropical climate, the golden sands, orthe clear blue ocean? Or is it the cool, laid backattitude and friendliness of the people? If you wereasked to think of a single word to describe the island,most people would say the same thing: Paradise.

Over 500,000 people visit Barbados every year, andalmost half of those are from the UK and Ireland.Most come back having enjoyed the holiday of alifetime. Few, thankfully, get to see the truth behindthe postcard image of this place; fewer still get to tellthe tale. But those unlucky enough to fall foul of thelaw as I did are left in no doubt—this is far fromheaven.

Corruption, squalor, poverty, crime: they all raisetheir ugly heads in this place, and though I deservedto be sent to prison for a crime I should not havecommitted, nobody deserves to have their humanrights taken away, and nobody should be forced to

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endure the horrors of that place where I spent morethan three years of my life.

Yes, I have made mistakes, and I have paid forthem, but I very nearly paid for them with my life, asI struggled to overcome disease, violence, and a full-blown riot in a place where there is one rule for thehaves and another for the have-nots, whereconditions are horrendous, and where there is nodistinction between a murderer and a pickpocket.

I have looked back over my life in an effort tounderstand where and why I went wrong, and I havecome to realise many things about myself. Some thingswill remain unanswered for me—there are some thingsI will never know—but one thing I do know is that Inever want to go back to prison, and I never want to goback to Barbados.

You might consider it Paradise, but I consider itHell.

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CHAPTER ONE

E A R L Y D A Z E

‘HERE, HOLD ON to this for us for a bit, can you?’ thisguy asked me, as he held out a bottle of orange fluid.I was 13. I didn’t know what it was.

‘It’s phy,’ he said, as if that explained something.Like an idiot I took it off him, gaining a sense ofimportance at entering this secret circle. I wasn’t surewhat I was supposed to do with it, and something ofthis uncertainty must have registered in the dim darkrecesses of his mind.

‘Phy,’ I repeated, rhyming it with the Greek letterphi, like I was in a trance. The full version of thatword, I would later learn, is Physeptone, a brandname for methadone, a heroin substitute prescribedto addicts. In theory, it helps them come off the stuff.In reality, it compounds the problem even further.Withdrawing from heroin takes about two to threeweeks, all together. Whenever I’ve withdrawn frommethadone, it has always taken much longer.Following my arrest years later in Barbados, it took allof six months to run that stuff out of my system.

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He had handed me the bottle, and then deep inhis pinpoint eyes a kind of cunning had appeared,like when you are outside, banging on the front door,and eventually a little light comes on at the end ofthe passage: Heaven’s name, the dealer is in after all!Liberation Day! Let’s hope all is well and he has gotsomething to serve up!

‘Ok,’ he said, ‘you can take a sip out of it, but nottoo much.’

I hadn’t even thought of taking a sip of it. But thereit was. He ended up giving me the bottle; my firstexperience of drugs. Looking back, all he was trying todo was get me started. Junkies are like that. They arealmost all intensely angry deep down, and want tostrike out at others. They like nothing better than tosee others falter.

It would be a long journey from the streets ofnorth London to a hellish prison in Barbados, and aneven longer one back to where I am now. But eachjourney starts with a single step, and my story startedthat day. From that point, there was no turning back.

* * *

It has always been in my nature to look at differentrealities, to turn away from this one. It is a form ofescapism, and it has been a trait of mine since I wasvery young. I have always been drawn to stories frommythology, for example. They removed me from theplace where I actually was, in an ‘anywhere but here’way, and made me feel better.

That guy left me with something more than justthe bottle of methadone that day; he left me with myfirst taste of an escape route out of my own existence,

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and I didn’t even have to go anywhere. He also left mea stash of syringes he wanted me to hide but which myfather found. I’d agreed to hide them because doingso made me feel like I had entered his world, andmore importantly, escaped from mine.

A few days later I knocked back the methadone. Ithink I drank it all, starting with a small sip; thenfinding I could handle it, I downed the lot. I nearlypassed out. Somehow I stayed put in my room andmanaged to avoid too much contact with anyone.How I managed that I don’t know, but it never cameto light.

After that, it all started, but I was never really outof control as a kid. I just wanted to belong to thisother world I knew was going on. I continued to getoccasional bottles of meth from the same guy, fromtime to time. I’d been let in, and I didn’t want toget out of this exciting new world just yet. The highwas strange; a feeling of weightlessness, of entering akingdom where suddenly I had not a care in theworld. I have looked back and tried to work out whyI started with methadone. I think it just turned outthat way really. I was just a curious kid, 13 years ofage, with nothing better to do, and a tendency to runaway from reality. Methadone just happened to be thefirst thing that came my way. If speed had beenavailable at the time I would probably have startedwith that. I had no idea where it would all lead, andnot in my wildest dreams did I ever think I would endup in a completely different world, thousands of milesfrom home, fearing for my life. But that is how itworked out.

Back then, I just wanted to get out of where I was.It was a natural desire that ran in my family. My dad

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was brought up in the East End, and in those days itwasn’t easy. The communities were very tight,unwelcoming to ‘outsiders’, not at all like they aretoday. The working class was a very closed club, andmovement out of it or into it was a rare and difficultthing. My old man had two brothers and a sister. Atthe end of the day they had to go scavenging andcollect vegetables that had fallen or been thrown onthe side of the road after the markets closed down. Mymum was from an Irish family.

Together, my parents got their place in a Londonflat complex where a number of well-known villainsused to reside. The Richardson family, second only tothe Krays in London’s gangland, were local, theirscrap-metal merchant yard just a few streets awayfrom the Guernsey Street flats where we lived.

When I was 11 my mum and dad first startedhaving their big rows. I remember being really scared.My sister and I would hear their voices coming upthrough the floor and wait for it to blow over.Sometimes, my dad would hit Mum. On one occasionhe knocked out one of her front teeth. Drink, inparticular whisky, seemed to fuel the violence. Itmade me hate him. Years later, when I was bigger, Iwas able to stand up to him. I sent him flying with aright hook, leaving him in shock and blood all overthe banister.

The rows got worse. Maybe that was why I beganteaming up with a couple of lads from the local school,hanging around the streets instead of at home. Wewould go out on Saturdays to go thieving, but this wasshort-lived, and ended one night when I was comingout from swimming. It must have been a Mondayevening. My old school was right next door to the

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swimming pool. As I looked at it, I became filled withanger at all the old injustices my former headmasterused to heap upon me; how he used to make me bendover and slipper me, for the flimsiest reasons orsometimes for no reason at all. Even at that age youcan tell when someone is taking the piss. So, I mademy way into the schoolyard. Surprisingly, the doorswere unlocked. I crept along the dark corridors until Ifound his study. Amazing! It was actually open.Creeping inside, I threw all his stuff around andsmashed everything up. I took my dick out and pissedall over his desk. Unfortunately for me, the cleanerspotted me as I left the building. I didn’t care.Something in me, some kind of blockage or anger, hadbeen freed in that stupid, wasteful, and yet liberatingact of vandalism.

It was to come back to haunt me a couple of dayslater, though. I got home from school to find a mansitting in the kitchen with my mum. He introducedhimself as a policeman and said he was investigatingsomething that had happened on Monday eveningat my old school. I immediately started to denyeverything, but my mum, being a nutty old cow,chimed in and told me to tell the truth.

‘I did it,’ was all I said.The next thing I knew I was being nicked, and my

mum was crying her eyes out over the sink. Thedashing young copper was doing his best to comforther, putting his arms around her, as I recall. My mumwas like that. Never miss a trick. Things died down abit after that, and after getting probation, I decided togive crime a miss.

Around this time I also started smoking with oneof my new-found friends, Biss. We would get together

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enough for a packet of Park Lane cigarettes. At first Ifound it difficult to inhale, but with practice I gotused to it. All my life I had seen my parents smoking,so it didn’t seem that weird a thing for me to be doing.I thought it made me look grown up, to have a fagdangling out of the end of my mouth. Images on TV,advertising, and films supported this image, theMarlon Brando look, you might say.

I got on with my schoolwork, but come weekendsI would team up with the lads to turn into my newalter ego, The Skinhead. We would put our scarves onand bowl down to White Hart Lane, TottenhamHotspur’s football ground, to pile in through the backdoors. Up along the stand, we would reassemble,ready to start piling into the fans of whoever Spurshappened to be playing against. With my big, cherryred bovver boots on, and with the steel toe caps theywere fitted out with, I would make short work of thestanding capacity of whoever I could get to. Many abig tough geezer went down like a sack of shit whenmy steelcapper collided with one of his shinbones. Ideveloped something of a reputation for it.

One evening when I was going out for a walk, mymum asked for a kiss, which I duly provided her with.She felt something inside the lining of my overcoatnudge against her. When she insisted I take it out, shediscovered the rounders bat I had secreted in thelining there. In the ensuing search, she found the flickknife, meat hook, and cutthroat razor that I usedto load up with prior to my evening stroll aroundthe town.

‘Terry, what’s all this for?’ she asked me.‘Insurance, mum,’ was all I said.

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In hindsight, I have come to the conclusion that Imay well have been more troubled as a youngsterthan I realised at the time.

Eventually, I got bored with the skinhead thing,and the phy, and at 16 became a weekend hippy. Thismeant plenty of dope-smoking, along with playingJimi Hendrix and the soundtrack to Easy Rider. I justfell into it because it was easier than stealing orfighting, and it suited my escapist mentality.

I teamed up with a lad called Vic and we wouldhave a right good smoke of hash. My mind wouldswitch off from everything, and only after severalhours would I return to Planet Earth. That was justthe way I wanted it. The less time I spent conscious ofwhere I actually was, the better.

My exams at school came and went. I applied togo to the London School of Economics, and imaginemy surprise when I managed to get sufficiently highgrades to be admitted! They had asked for two Bs,which I actually surpassed in my A-level exams. Thisobviously meant a lot of interesting experienceswere about to come my way, as the doors of thehallowed London School of Economics were openingto me.

* * *

Starting at the LSE was a big thing for me. But Icouldn’t get over the reaction of my parents! My mumwould spend hours on the phone, telling all her mateshow brainy her son was. The amount of satisfactionwomen seem to get from making each other sick withjealousy has never ceased to amaze me. Even my old

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man seemed to be walking about ten inches taller andhad taken up smoking cigars.

Like most young people, my eyes were opened forthe first time when I started college. I started to takean interest in politics and joined up with all sorts ofsocieties campaigning for social justice, from Labourto the International Marxists and the Communists,but to be honest, what attracted me at first to thesegroups were the model-like young women theyunfairly put on display to lure you towards them.

I was pretty clueless when it came to women at thistime. In fact, much of my sexual experience had beengained with my faithful rubber dolly. It would takeme 30 minutes to blow it up and about ten to shag itsenseless. One day, though, my mum found it whenshe was clearing out my room. I came home thatnight to find my dolly all blown up and sitting at thekitchen table, like a guest coming in for tea.

Needless to say, it wasn’t long before I found myfellow dope smokers at college. They were holed up inone of the little side rooms next to the student unionoffice. From there, great clouds of hash smoke wouldbillow out and down the corridor, like frankincense ina temple. Whenever I entered, I could see a motleycollection of long-haired individuals of indeterminatesex sitting in a circle. The glowing embers from ajoint-end would glow more brightly for a second, assomeone toked at its other end, held their breath, andthen breathed out what was left of the fumes.

It was as if I’d joined some secret society. I realisenow that this is one of the underlying delusions/illusions of those that engage in drug-taking; thatthey are part of an elite unit or order, or have beenchosen by something, or for something. As far as I was

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concerned, this was just something I was supposed todo—experience life and all it had to offer, and becomea part of a world outside of that I had grown up in. Itwasn’t harmful, I thought; it was good for me.

With my new-found social awareness I foundmyself involved in many demonstrations, against USinvolvement in Vietnam, the 17 November 1967military coup in Greece, the apartheid regime inSouth Africa, and the military junta in Chile.Immediately prior to Freshers’ Week, the military hadtaken over in Chile, killing President Salvador Allendeand many others. General Pinochet established amilitary junta and proceeded to imprison and tortureall those who opposed his power. We all knew that theovert or at the very least covert support of the westerngovernments was felt by all these regimes. So, forsomeone such as myself, with an interest in politicsand a naïve but deep belief that the world could bechanged for the better, there was a lot to do apartfrom studying and getting through the exams.

Around this time, I picked up two tarot decks inLondon. They really appealed to me for some reason,even though I didn’t know how to read them. When Ilooked through the meanings and interpretations ofthe various signs and symbols, it all seemed to makeperfect sense, and I started to get interested. Ieventually got the hang of them and would later usethem to great effect, taking them with me wherever Iwent. In those days tarot decks were much rarer, andpeople would flock to me to have a reading.

Nineteen Seventy-three saw the Miners’ Strike,which highlighted to us students that the systemsimply was not working anymore. The lights in all thehouses and offices were shut off; factories, entire

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industries, were coming to a halt. Half the nation wason a three-day week. The newspapers ran lurid talesof a possible take-over here in Britain. It really didseem as though we had been born in a very interestingtime, sufficiently so to see the dawn of the Britishrevolution and the collapse of the old capitalistregime. For me, like many others, capitalism was abad word.

At the LSE, the organisations of the revolutionaryleft went into overdrive, and so did my outlook.Meetings were held; rallies took place left and right.There was scarcely a spare moment to read coursematerial, but somehow I plodded through that. Someof us wondered if our subjects were ever going to beuseful in the New Britain that seemed to be emergingaround us. Delegations of Welsh miners came up tosleep in the college, and we as the Student Unionvoted overwhelmingly to accommodate them.

Meanwhile, my social awakening was not limitedto the rights of the worker, or the occasional dope-smoking get-together. I found myself being invited toan ‘acid party’, and I was intrigued. What wouldhappen there? If I took this stuff, what might I see?Would I experience one of the visionary states that weused to hear about from others that had already tried itout? It was definitely considered to be very senior tohave dropped acid—far more so than just being anordinary dope smoker. So, I put my name down for it.My first experience was not one to be remembered, andafter a night being chased by imaginary serpents andseeing my college mates kiss each other, I decided thatall I wanted to do was go home and have a cup of tea.That was not the end of my tripping days, though. Farfrom it.

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Life wasn’t all trips. Somehow I managed to make itthrough the course. At the end of it, I sat through threeweeks of exams. The temperature outside soared intothe nineties. It was the sweltering summer of 1976. Allsummer long, there was hardly a breath of wind in theair. People were passing out in the street and in theirhomes. There was a water shortage, and the use of hosepipes to water gardens was strictly banned.

I staggered through the Finals and just aboutpassed, not particularly distinguishing myself with aThird. It could have been worse, but I still felt like atotal failure. When Admin stuck the pass list up onthe notice board, there was my name, just above thethin red line, below which were listed all the realfailures. I was filled with a feeling I would becomefamiliar with over the years: disappointment. I knew Icould have done more, that I could have done better;but there I was, scraping by, and I just wanted to getout of there.

This feeling was to come back and haunt methroughout my life, sending me all over the world insearch of something, but never knowing what thatsomething was. All I knew was that I didn’t want tolead a normal 9 to 5 existence. In the end, that meantdropping out, and I was to do that spectacularly.