Never Let Me Go: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Kathy immediately feels guilty about hurting Ruth’s feelings and exposing her lie. In the weeks following this incident, then, she does everything she can to make Ruth feel that Miss Geraldine does in fact treat her specially. Kathy makes comments around the other girls indicating that Ruth is Geraldine’s favorite, and also lets Ruth goes first into a doorway, in order to allow Ruth to walk alongside Geraldine for a time. One day, in art class with Mr. Rogers, Kathy even hints to another student, Midge, that the pencil case did in fact come from a secret source—a guardian—and that she, Kathy, cannot divulge that information to Midge. Ruth appreciates all of Kathy’s efforts, and the two become closer friends.

Kathy notes that Ruth had a chance to repay these kindnesses, when Ruth attempts to find Kathy’s “lost tape.” But before explaining this, Kathy describes to the reader how the students thought of Norfolk, a region in the southeast of England. During geography lessons, Miss Emily once described Norfolk to the assembled students as “something of a lost corner of England.” Although Miss Emily meant that Norfolk was not easily accessible by highway, and was therefore somewhat separate from the other counties, the students, including Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, took this to mean that Norfolk was in fact a place in England where all lost items migrated and were stored.

Kathy wonders, now, while telling this story whether they really believed in this “lost and found” quality of Norfolk, or whether it was pretend even then. Kathy concludes, after talking to Ruth and Tommy as their carers, that they did in fact believe in Norfolk, but only “for a time,” and that later, when they went there as adolescents, they in fact knew that Norfolk had only a symbolic, and not a literal, value for them as a special place.

But Kathy notes that she has gone off on a tangent, and describes her lost tape. The tape is called Songs After Dark and was put out by a singer named Judy Bridgewater, released first in 1956, although Kathy had a “cassette version.” Kathy bought the tape at a sale, and found it to be of special value not only because she liked the music and the cover art—which displayed Judy Bridgewater in a dress—but because Bridgewater was smoking in the picture, and smoking was expressly banned at Hailsham. Kathy goes off on another tangent, noting that the rule against smoking was a hard-and-fast one. Miss Lucy, one day explaining the rule to the students (Kathy was around 11 years old), tried to explain that Hailsham students were “different” from the rest of the population, and that smoking would harm their bodies and make their jobs more difficult. But no students prodded Lucy to explain further, and Kathy notes that the issue was dropped at this vague explanation.

Kathy returns to describing the tape, and one song in particular that she loved on it, called “Never Let Me Go.” Kathy imagines this song to be about “a woman who cannot have babies,” but who does miraculously manage to have one. The song, Kathy believes, is a love letter to this young baby, and Kathy used to mime holding a child to her chest while singing it to herself, taking great comfort in its music and lyrics.

One day, Kathy notes, she was doing exactly this—playing the song loudly, and dancing along, as though cradling a child to her chest—when Madame walked past her open door. Kathy was mortified, and noticed that Madame was watching her dance with tears in her eyes. Kathy didn’t understand why Madame didn’t discipline her—instead, Madame simply walked away, sobbing to herself.

Years later, when they were adolescents, Kathy told Tommy, and only Tommy, this story, and said at the time that she knew, at that point, that she and other students couldn’t have children. Kathy wondered whether Madame sympathized with her for this reason, and Tommy seemed to agree—but Kathy also noted that Madame would have no way of knowing that Kathy was dancing with a little invisible child, instead of interpreting the song the way it ought to have been—as a love letter between a woman and a lover who has left her. Tommy responds only that “Madame can read minds,” and the two laugh at the incident as teens, even though they are “unsettled” by it.

A few weeks after the “Madame incident,” Kathy continues telling the reader, the tape “disappeared” from Kathy’s collection. Kathy wondered whether this disappearance had to do with Madame’s sadness, or perhaps with the cover depicting a cigarette. In any event, Kathy came to believe, after several weeks, that the tape was gone forever. One day, Ruth came up to her, saying she had also looked high and low for the tape and couldn’t find it, but that she had found a replacement tape at a sale, one Kathy might like, although Ruth knew very little about different types of music. The tape was called Twenty Classic Dance Tunes, and although it sounded “nothing like” the Bridgewater tape, Kathy tells the reader that she still owns it, and that it’s “one of her most precious possessions.”