Students of Hailsham are Special

Never Let Me Go | Chapters 1-6 (spoilers included)

You are reading my weekly review of our November read-through of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. If you would like to join in, go ahead and subscribe to my newsletter and make sure to select “Books and Brews” from the manage subscription page.

Warning: spoilers abound

It’s best to go into this book blind. Truths are revealed gradually, so it’s normal to be confused for the first couple of chapters (Ishiguro loves doing that to his readers). It takes a few chapters to get there, but by now, it’s becoming somewhat clear what’s going on:

Kathy H., her friends, and the “students” at Hailsham are clones, made for the purpose of organ harvesting (or as they call it, “donations”). However, their experience is distinctly different and privileged in contrast to clones in other establishments.

What are your general thoughts, now that we’re more than halfway through our protagonists’ childhoods?

Table of Contents

1. Character list

2. Recap of chapters 1-6

3. My thoughts

4. Discussion questions & things to think about

The Characters

Kathy

We meet Kathy at a turning point in her life: when she is about to become a donor herself, after being a carer for eleven years. Like those who look back upon their lives near the end, Kathy reminisces about hers. It’s her way of trying to make sense of her life and experience.

Because Kathy is an unreliable narrator, we need to sift through her words to arrive at the truth. Important to note is Kathy’s self-restraint and guardedness. She spends more time observing the actions of others than participating herself, but is either lacking in self-awareness, or deliberately evading certain feelings she doesn’t want to face. This becomes ever clearer, as we see Kathy literally walking away when she is upset, both from Tommy and Ruth.

Ruth

A natural leader with a fierce personality, Ruth adopts Kathy into friendship with her. I’m still puzzling over why Kathy remains friends with Ruth for so long, especially since Ruth already shows signs of capacity for cruelty toward even her friends. She is controlling, and also has a tendency to embellish stories or even flat-out make things up.

In spite of her outward bravado, however, Ruth is actually a lonely and fragile character, evidenced by her reaction the incident with the pencil box in chapter 5. Like Kathy she hides behind misdirection and avoidance. Neither she nor Kathy confront emotions or issues straightforwardly.

Ruth’s proclivity for making up stories shows an active imagination, as well as a streak of idealism.

Tommy

Though far less subtle and more straightforward than Kathy or Ruth, in some ways Tommy is more reflective than he appears, as we see from his conversation with Kathy about Miss Lucy. He expresses his emotions clearly, though it’s unclear how aware he is of why he feels a certain way. He certainly doesn’t seem to grasp subtleties or nuances from other people.

We haven’t gotten to know Tommy very well yet. From what we have seen, he has an explosive temper. He seems somewhat dim and lacks an aptitude for art or creativity, which makes him a target of bullying from other students.

Miss Lucy

Miss Lucy is one of the guardians at Hailsham. She is the one who first tells Tommy he doesn’t have to try so hard and that it’s okay for him to not be creative. Miss Lucy’s philosophy differs drastically from Miss Emily’s, the head guardian, as we will later find out. It will be interesting to hear what you think of her stance after we learn more about the school and what its purpose is.

Madame

Madame collects work from Hailsham students periodically for what the students refer to as her Gallery. The Gallery will be important later on, so keep this in mind as you read.

Miss Emily

Again, pay attention to Miss Emily and hints of what she believes about clones, especially in contrast to Miss Lucy. Kathy describes Miss Emily as stern but fair. She frequently lectures the students about their privilege and how they ought to behave in light of how special they are as Hailsham students.

Recap of Chapters 1-6

Important information is scattered throughout Kathy’s recollections. One of the first things to ask is, what are donors, what are carers, what are Hailsham students, and what are Kathy and her friends?

Hailsham is quickly established as a place of privilege, as shown through the reactions of donors who hadn’t grown up there.

Kathy H., they say, she gets to pick and choose, and she always chooses her own kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates.¹

Kathy’s descriptions of Hailsham reveals an idyllic boarding school—one I wouldn’t have minded attending, except for the looming reality of having to donate my organs in the prime of my life.. That’s the irony though, and the horror.

We are introduced to Tommy through one of his temper tantrums, and learn that because of his lack of artistic ability, the other students mercilessly bully him and purposely leave him out. Tommy responds to this peer torture by throwing violent fits.

Later on, Kathy notices Tommy mellowing out and refusing to respond to the bullying until it eventually stops. When she asks if something happened to cause the change, Tommy confides in her that Miss Lucy had told him it wasn’t his fault he wasn’t creative, and that he didn’t have to try so hard if he didn’t want to. After that talk, he felt better about himself.

During the same encounter, Tommy mentions that Miss Lucy grew angry about something and said the students weren’t taught enough about what their lives would be like once they began donating.

The emphasis on creativity at Hailsham appears in the form of the Gallery, which the students believe is a place Madame takes their best work (“our paints, sketches, pottery, all our essays and poems”).

In mentioning Madame, Kathy recalls a time Ruth led a group of their friends to swarm around Madame during one of her visits, to test a theory that Madame was afraid of them. They realise after this incident that Madame was afraid of them “in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders.”

Kathy then tells us about the Sales, where students can purchase little things (that were usually old and broken, as it turns out) with tokens they earned from having their work selected for Madame’s Gallery. The Sales differ from the Exchanges, which is where students can buy each other’s work for themselves to keep.

The Sales were a complete contrast to the hushed atmosphere of the Exchanges. They were held in the Dining Hall, and were crowded and noisy. In fact the pushing and shouting was all part of the fun … Except, as I say, every now and then, things would get out of hand, with students grabbing and tugging, sometimes fighting. Then the monitors would threaten to close the whole thing down, and we’d all of us have to face a talking to from Miss Emily at assembly the next morning. … There was a real sense of feeling bad that we had, in some collective way, let down Miss Emily, but try as we might, we couldn’t really follow these lectures. It was partly her language: “Unworthy of privilege” and “misuse of opportunity”… Her general drift was clear enough: we were all very special, being Hailsham students, and so it was all the more disappointing when we behaved badly. (emphasis mine)

Kathy then talks about her friendship with Ruth, who picked her one day to play with. Their first time playing was Ruth leading Kathy to ride her imaginary horses together, after which, Ruth inducts her into her “secret guard” for Miss Geraldine, one of the students’ favourite guardians.

After a quarrel, Ruth kicks Kathy out of the secret guard. Kathy later retaliates by calling Ruth’s bluff about being gifted a pencil case by Miss Geraldine.²

The girls make up with one another in their typical, roundabout way.³

During a Sale, Kathy found a tape, Songs After Dark, by Judy Bridgewater with the song, “Never Let Me Go” on it.

And what I’d imagined was a woman who’d been told she couldn’t have babies, who’d really, really wanted them all her life. Then there’s a sort of miracle and she has a baby, and she holds this baby very close to her and walks around singing: “Baby, never let me go…” partly because she’s so happy, but also because she’s so afraid something will happen, that the baby will get ill or be taken away from her.

As Kathy listened to her song one time, she slow-danced around the room with a pillow. She suddenly noticed Madame standing in the doorway, weeping as she watched Kathy.

Sometime later, Kathy loses this tape, “gone to Norfolk,” as they say.⁴

My Thoughts

As I mentioned in the chat, I automatically assume an unreliable narrator when the author chooses to use first-person POV. This is doubly true with Ishiguro, who frequently incorporates themes of memory into his works. Kathy frequently remarks on the inconsistencies between how she remembers certain things and how others remember them. Kathy’s narration is meandering and a bit confusing, as she jumps from memory to memory. Memories are snapshots of moments in time rather than movie clips, after all.

When looking from the understanding that memories are emotions attached to events—and therefore, stronger emotions make a memory stronger. However, with the stronger memory, there is also more potential for distortion of the memory. That could be an interesting theory to explore as we read on.

Something that stood out to me was Kathy’s frequent mention of the Exchanges and Sales—the students’ ways of building up collections of personal belongings. There’s an irony in that, considering they are clones made for organ donation; they don’t have ownership of their own bodies. Perhaps the guardians created this culture in order to allow them to have a sense of ownership in spite of their purpose.

Kathy often brings up some conversations from the past, then states that they didn’t delve deeper into an issue because they weren’t “ready to go there yet.” An interesting thing to question is whether or not ignorance is bliss. Kathy and the other students at Hailsham know their purpose is to donate their organs so that other people can live a little longer, but as Miss Lucy avers, they don’t fully grasp what that means.

I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves—about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside—but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant yet.

I really like this whole page from chapter three. It sets the stage for what the students’ experience is, their growing understanding of who they are.

At the same time, it serves as a microcosm for humanity and how we deal with mortality. We all know we’re going to die someday, just like the clones, yet we don’t truly know what that means. This leads me to the next thought:

Despite Ruth’s penchant for creating fantasies that Kathy and the other girls clearly know are false, they mostly play along. Kathy even goes so far as to defend Ruth angrily against another girl who points out how silly it all is. I wondered why they cling to Ruth’s fantasies so hard, and my tentative conclusion is, they somehow sense that with growing up comes impending “completion” (their word for “death”). As such, they desperately hold onto the dreams of childhood where a different future than the one they face may still be possible in some alternate reality.

Which is what makes Kathy’s dance with the pillow so tragic, and why I think Madame is so heartbroken for her over it. Whether or not Madame realises Kathy is picturing a baby (which is equally impossible) or a future partner, she knows that such a future will never become reality for any of these children. Yet the longing Kathy unconsciously shows in this private moment reveals such depth of her humanity.

My last thought for these chapters is the passage about Norfolk, where the Hailsham students believe is a huge lost-and-found.

“when we lost something precious, and we’d looked and looked and still couldn’t find it, then we didn’t have to be completely heartbroken. We still had that last bit of comfort, thinking one day, when we were grown up, and we were free to travel around the country, we could always go and find it again in Norfolk.” (emphasis mine)

This brief passage betrays the utter humanness to envision, first of all, a future in which they could grow up and be free, and second of all, to one day get back what they once lost. Something about Norfolk tugs at my own heart; it awakens a yearning for moments and people I also can never get back, along with a faint wish for a place like Norfolk where I could go to find them again.

Discussion Questions & Things to Think About

1. Why would Miss Emily and other “privileged estates” bother putting in so much effort to give these clones a rich childhood when they’re bred for slaughter?

2. How might the story change if told from Ruth or Tommy’s perspective?

3. Regarding Tommy’s conversation with Miss Lucy about not needing to force creativity, what’s the link between creativity and Miss Lucy’s belief that the students were “not being taught enough”?

4. Something to tuck into the back of your mind as you read on: did Miss Lucy actually do Tommy a favour by telling him he didn’t have to try anymore?

5. Something else to tuck into the back of your mind as you read: was Miss Lucy right, or was Miss Emily?

6. Why does Kathy remain friends with Ruth? That’s what I really want to know.

7. What are some examples of Kathy and/or Ruth hiding their true feelings from others, or from themselves?

Housekeeping questions

How are you feeling about the reading? Do you have any feedback for me, to make this experience more enjoyable?

Do you like the daily chat for each chapter, or would you prefer something different (having one chat thread for the whole week, for example)?

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There we have it! We’ve covered a lot of ground. There is a lot to digest and think about as we continue our reading. I hope you are having fun with me!

Next Up

We will be reading chapters 7-12 over the next week, with a one day break in between. You are welcome to read slower or read ahead as you wish. This isn’t school, and these aren’t assigned readings. My posts will be here for perusal at your leisure, so you can join the discussion at any time.

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If you haven’t yet and would like to join in, go ahead and subscribe to my newsletter and make sure to select “Books and Brews” from the manage subscription page.

Until next time,

1. Quote from the second page of the first chapter, emphasis mine

2. Both quarrels stem from Ruth’s tendency to make up things to make herself seem more important and knowledgeable than she really is.

3. Kathy plays along with Ruth’s pencil-box-is-a-gift-from-Miss-Geraldine fantasy to others, and Ruth shows her gratitude by finding a music tape to replace one Kathy treasured but lost.

4. The students joke about lost things ending up in Norfolk as a way to comfort themselves, that they might one day find everything they’ve lost.