Part One: Hailsham (Chapters 1 to 9)

Kathy’s memories begin in her adult life

Part One covers Chapters 1 to 9, but it does not begin with Kathy arriving at school. It begins with thirty-one-year-old Kathy describing her present work: “I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years” (Chapter 1). A carer supports people undergoing organ donations. Kathy is proud of her ability to keep her donors calm and help them recover, explaining that “My donors have always tended to do much better than expected” (Chapter 1).

These opening statements establish a capable, observant narrator. They also raise questions. What does “expected” mean, and who decides what happens to these people? Kathy uses familiar words such as carer and donor without explaining the unfamiliar system behind them. Her conversational prose makes this world sound ordinary before the reader understands its cruelty.

Kathy’s adult life provides the frame for her memories of Hailsham. The narration is first-person and retrospective: she moves between remembered childhood experiences and later conversations with her friends. Consequently, we must distinguish the young Kathy’s understanding from the older Kathy’s interpretation. Her attention to small details can make her convincing, but her affection for Hailsham and her own involvement in events also shape what she tells us.

Hailsham: a sheltered school with disturbing boundaries

Hailsham resembles an English country boarding school. It has lessons, playing fields, a pavilion, friendships and school routines. Yet the children have guardians rather than parents, and unusually strong emphasis is placed on creativity and physical health. Frequent medical checks and the horror surrounding smoking become ominous once we understand that the students’ organs are being preserved for other people.

The surrounding woods make the limits of this sheltered world frightening. Kathy recalls, “There were all kinds of horrible stories about the woods” (Chapter 5). Literally, these are rumours told among children, including stories of mutilation and death. Their implied significance is wider: the children learn to associate the space beyond Hailsham with danger. Fear helps keep them within the world they know, without every boundary needing an adult to enforce it.

The woods also foreshadow the violence that donation will eventually inflict on their bodies. They are not simply a pleasant school’s spooky backdrop. They introduce threat into Kathy’s nostalgic account, making Hailsham seem protective and controlling at the same time.

Tommy’s anger grows out of humiliation

In Chapter 1, the other boys deliberately leave Tommy out when choosing football teams, hoping to provoke a tantrum. His anger becomes entertainment for the watching students. Kathy approaches him and tries to calm him despite pressure from Ruth to return to the group. This establishes an important distinction between watching someone suffer and taking the social risk of helping them.

Chapter 2 explains the connection between Tommy’s isolation and his difficulties with art. Creativity carries great prestige at Hailsham, so his lack of artistic success makes him vulnerable. Kathy describes “sneers and giggles” and Tommy’s “deliberately childish pictures”. The paired nouns capture both open contempt and quieter, shared amusement. His childish paintings are a defence: by appearing not to try, he can avoid admitting that he has tried and failed. When he makes a genuine effort, the scrutiny and mockery continue.

The bullying therefore forms a cycle. Humiliation produces anger; the anger gives the other students another reason to provoke him. His problem spreads beyond art lessons into school life more generally. He is not merely a badly behaved child: Ishiguro connects his behaviour to insecurity, exclusion and the values of the institution around him.

Tommy tells Kathy, “A couple of months back I had this talk with Miss Lucy” (Chapter 2). Miss Lucy has reassured him that he need not worry about being uncreative. Her intervention helps him become calmer because it challenges the belief that artistic failure makes him worthless. Kathy finds the reassurance surprising precisely because it contradicts Hailsham’s normal priorities.

Exchanges, Sales and the mystery of the Gallery

The children acquire possessions through two different events. At the Exchanges, they use tokens to obtain work made by other students. At the Sales, they obtain clothes and objects brought from outside Hailsham. Their treasured belongings are kept in personal wooden chests. In a childhood without ordinary family possessions, these collections help establish individual identity and attachment.

The Exchanges also create a hierarchy: producing admired work brings tokens, recognition and status. Remembering the value placed on poetry, Kathy says, “We’d spend precious tokens on an exercise book” (Chapter 2). “Precious” makes the tokens sound scarce and valuable. The detail shows how thoroughly the children have absorbed the belief that creative work matters.

Madame visits to take away the best work for what the students call the Gallery. This creates a practical grievance as well as a mystery: if their best pieces are removed, how can the children receive tokens for them? The dispute is addressed, but the honour of selection for the Gallery is emphasised. Hailsham teaches the students to value an institution whose purpose they cannot explain.

In Chapter 4, Miss Lucy responds to their questions about Madame’s taking their work. Her reassurance offers comfort without a full explanation. This matters for her character: even the guardian who later speaks most openly initially participates in withholding knowledge. The students’ uncertainty about art prepares for her later warning and her reversal of the advice she gave Tommy.

Madame’s fear exposes the children’s exclusion

In Chapter 3, Ruth suspects that Madame is afraid of the students. The children deliberately approach her together to test this idea. Her reaction confirms their suspicion, and Kathy describes her fear as being “in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders”.

The simile is dehumanising. Spiders are creatures people may recoil from even when they pose no immediate danger. Through this comparison, Kathy recognises that Madame sees a disturbing difference between herself and the children. A woman associated with their valued artwork responds to their physical presence with fear.

Literally, the scene shows Madame recoiling. Its implied meaning is that the children’s apparent normality inside Hailsham does not guarantee acceptance outside it. Structurally, the encounter is an early disclosure of their otherness: the reader encounters this emotional evidence before Miss Lucy explicitly explains their futures.

Ruth’s invented worlds give her power

Ruth’s imaginary horses initially help create intimacy with Kathy. Her secret guard, supposedly protecting Miss Geraldine from a plot, gives their group a shared purpose. However, it also makes Ruth the person who controls information, membership and authority. Kathy’s description that “there was no doubt that she was the leader” (Chapter 5) captures the certainty of Ruth’s position.

The game has two meanings. It resembles familiar childhood make-believe, but it also mirrors Hailsham’s atmosphere of secrets and unexplained adult behaviour. The children invent a danger they can respond to while remaining unable to confront the real danger governing their lives.

Ruth’s pencil case becomes another means of claiming importance. She suggests that it was a special gift from Miss Geraldine. Being favoured by a guardian would distinguish her from the others and offer something resembling personal, parental affection. Kathy’s investigation threatens this claim, but she later helps Ruth avoid public exposure.

The episode in Chapter 6 complicates both girls. Ruth can be manipulative, yet her need to appear special reveals vulnerability. Kathy values honesty, yet loyalty and sympathy lead her to protect Ruth’s feelings. Friendship here involves negotiation and unequal power, not uncomplicated kindness.

Kathy’s tape connects affection with loss

Kathy’s Judy Bridgewater tape is a treasured possession from the Sales. Its cover shows the singer smoking, giving the object a quietly rebellious appeal in a school where smoking is treated as especially dangerous.

In Chapter 6, Kathy listens to “Never Let Me Go” while holding a pillow as though it were a baby. Her imagined scene expresses a longing to cherish someone and prevent separation. Madame sees her and cries, but Kathy cannot understand the adult’s response. The scene places a child’s private, affectionate fantasy beside an adult’s awareness of the children’s circumstances.

The tape later disappears. Its loss gives physical form to the insecurity surrounding things Kathy loves. Miss Emily’s description of Norfolk as “a peaceful corner of England, rather nice” (Chapter 6), together with its description as a lost corner, feeds the children’s belief that lost possessions might end up there. This is another example of literal and implied meaning diverging: an adult’s description of a place becomes a comforting childhood explanation of loss.

The song’s title also develops a central concern of Part One. The students seek security in possessions, friendship and affection, although none of these can guarantee that people or places will remain with them.

Miss Lucy makes their future explicit

In Chapter 7, Miss Lucy hears students imagining ordinary adult careers. She interrupts these hopes with the statement, “Your lives are set out for you”. The passive construction makes their lack of control clear: their lives have been arranged by others. She explains that they will donate their vital organs before reaching middle age because this is what they were created to do.

Her phrase “told and not told” describes a particularly troubling kind of education. The students have encountered facts about donation, but these facts have not become a clear understanding of what donation will mean for them. Knowledge can be introduced gradually, mixed with other subjects or heard before children are ready to grasp its significance. Information has therefore been given without producing informed choice.

Miss Lucy’s honesty can be read as care: she believes the students need reality rather than comforting illusions. Yet her speech is also devastating because it closes off the futures they imagine. The tension is not simply between a kind teacher and unkind teachers. It concerns whether sheltering children from terrible knowledge protects them or prevents them from understanding their own lives.

Part One ends with uncertainty and renewed attachment

As the students grow older, Ruth and Tommy become a couple, while Tommy’s friendship with Kathy continues. When Ruth and Tommy separate, Ruth asks Kathy to help bring them back together. Kathy is drawn into managing a relationship that also affects her own feelings.

In Chapter 9, Tommy tells Kathy that Miss Lucy has changed her advice. She now insists that his art matters for his own sake and could provide evidence. This overturns the reassurance that helped him and leaves both friends confused about what creativity is meant to prove.

The next day, the students learn that Miss Lucy has left and will not return. Her departure removes a possible source of explanation just when they need one. Ruth and Tommy reunite that evening. Their renewed relationship can be understood as a search for stability after an abrupt loss, echoing the wish expressed by “Never Let Me Go”.

Part One therefore moves from apparently familiar school memories towards explicit knowledge of exploitation, but it does not resolve every mystery. Art, health and adult behaviour acquire increasingly disturbing meanings. Meanwhile, the children’s loyalties and rivalries establish their emotional humanity, challenging the system that treats them as useful bodies rather than people with independent futures.

Using these moments in OCR responses

Part (a) is a 20-mark comparison of two printed prose extracts. AO1, your understanding and response, and AO3, relevant context, each carry twice the weighting of AO2, analysis of methods. Context here includes the social situations visible in the extracts, such as isolation, peer pressure or family support.

OCR’s 2024 comparison used Tommy’s difficulties with art and bullying alongside a boy struggling at school in Anne Griffin’s When All Is Said. Tommy faces the problem alone within the passage, whereas Griffin’s boy receives encouragement from his brother and relief through sport. In Ishiguro’s passage, short sentences after longer descriptions make the worsening problem feel abrupt and inescapable. The comparison depends on both the characters’ circumstances and how the writing presents them.

Part (b), also worth 20 marks, asks about another moment in the novel. AO1 and AO2 are equally weighted. Useful Part One choices include Kathy helping Tommy, the pencil case episode, Madame’s fear, Miss Lucy’s warning and her sudden departure. The choice must fit the particular question.

Worked paragraph — Part (b): an unexpected moment

In Chapter 3, Madame’s reaction unexpectedly exposes the distance between the Hailsham students and the outside world. Kathy describes her fear as being “in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders”. The simile turns apparently ordinary children into creatures from which an adult instinctively recoils. This is particularly unsettling because Madame takes the artwork that Hailsham teaches them to value: her interest in their creations does not translate into ease in their presence. By placing this encounter before Miss Lucy’s explicit warning, Ishiguro allows the students and reader to feel their exclusion before fully understanding its cause.

The main movement

• Chapter 1: thirty-one-year-old Kathy introduces her work as a carer and remembers Hailsham; the boys provoke Tommy and Kathy intervenes.
• Chapters 2–3: art-related humiliation explains Tommy’s anger; Miss Lucy’s reassurance helps him. Madame’s fear reveals the students’ otherness.
• Chapters 4–6: the Gallery and tokens raise questions; Ruth’s games and pencil case establish her authority. Kathy’s tape connects affection, possessions and loss.
• Chapter 7: Miss Lucy states that the students were created to donate organs.
• Chapters 8–9: adult distress and uncertainty deepen. Miss Lucy reverses her advice about art, then leaves; Ruth and Tommy reunite.

Essential distinctions

• Exchange: students’ own creative work. objects brought from outside.