The close bond between Sunday Small and Tommy Branning

Sunday Small and Tommy Branning form a close, protective friendship within the workhouse, where separation, hunger, and uncertainty make trust a practical act of care. Their bond is expressed through concern for Daisy Branning, promises of a different life, and the hope that leaving the institution will not mean losing one another. When Daisy tells Sunday that Tommy loves her, the relationship’s intimacy becomes newly visible, though Sunday continues to understand him as the brother she never had rather than as a suitor.

A bond formed under institutional separation

The workhouse’s organization placed women, boys, girls, and men in separate sections. Inmates did not often come together except on Sundays, when they were permitted to attend church; the separation could devastate families. Work also divided daily life: boys might be assigned to oakum picking, bone crushing, or the gardens, while girls and women sewed uniforms, cooked, cleaned, or laboured in the laundry. Against this arrangement, the airing yard’s high wire fence becomes a recurring boundary between Sunday and Tommy. They can meet and speak across it, but they cannot simply cross to comfort one another.

The first exchanges shown between them establish care as the relationship’s governing language. Tommy comes anxiously to the fence to ask after Daisy, who has been in the sickbay with a fever. Sunday reassures him that Daisy is over the worst, but cannot promise when he will see her. His distress is plain; Sunday wishes she could tear down the fence and give him a cuddle. The image makes the limits of their friendship concrete: she can offer truthful reassurance and tenderness, but the institution controls their access to each other and to Daisy.

Shared responsibility and imagined escape

Tommy asks Sunday to look after Daisy for him, and she agrees, though she feels helpless. His request entrusts Daisy’s well-being to Sunday, who is already attentive to her friend; it also gives their bond a responsibility that reaches beyond their conversations at the fence. Sunday’s care for Daisy becomes a way of caring for Tommy too, while Tommy’s trust confirms that he sees Sunday as someone dependable in a place where the children have little control.

Their talk also turns toward life beyond the workhouse. Tommy describes learning carpentry in the workshop and says he might like to work with wood when he gets out, then doubts aloud that he will ever leave. Sunday answers with a vivid shared plan: they will all escape, work on a farm, care for animals, grow their own food, and never be hungry or hurt again. Her promise is larger than a practical prediction; it gives form to a future in which the children’s labor serves their own household rather than an institution, and where safety and food are no longer uncertain. As Tommy walks away with his shoulders sagging, Sunday silently vows to get them all out. The distance between that vow and their present confinement measures both her determination and the limits they face.

Leaving, loyalty, and the meaning of family

When Sunday prepares to leave the workhouse for employment, Daisy tells her that Tommy is already pining for her. Sunday answers that Daisy and Tommy are like family to her, the only family she has known. The exchange defines the relationship from Sunday’s point of view: it belongs to a chosen family built through daily companionship and mutual care, not through blood. Her departure is therefore more than a change of workplace. It threatens to separate her from the people who have made the institution less lonely.

At the fence, Tommy mournfully acknowledges that Sunday is leaving. She promises to come back every Sunday afternoon, come hell or high water. He responds not by asking her to stay, but by worrying about how she will be treated in her new position. If the woman she works for mistreats her, he says, she will have him to answer to when he gets out. His protective threat echoes the trust he placed in Sunday to care for Daisy: their support is reciprocal, even though each has little power in the present. Tommy also directs her toward Mrs Lockett or Lady Lavinia Huntley if she is worried, making his concern practical rather than merely emotional.

Affection disclosed, but not returned in the same form

Daisy later clarifies that Tommy’s attachment is not simply the affection of a close friend: he loves Sunday. Sunday is flabbergasted because she has always regarded him as the brother she never had. The disclosure changes how she looks at him the next morning, noticing his recent growth and imagining the handsome man he may become, but it does not make her suddenly able to see him as a suitor. She still cannot picture him that way. The moment preserves an important difference between them: Tommy’s feelings include romantic love, while Sunday’s strongest understanding of their bond remains familial.

The discovery does not erase the loyalty already established between them. Sunday has promised to return, and Tommy has urged her to seek help if she needs it; both gestures express attachment without resolving it into romance. Later, after Daisy’s death and the loss of his parents, Tommy is described as struggling to come to terms with being alone in the world. That account gives his earlier reliance on Sunday additional weight, but does not establish what becomes of their relationship afterward. Within the scenes that define their bond, its significance lies in the care they offer under constraint: Sunday takes responsibility for the sister Tommy fears for, and Tommy insists that Sunday herself should be protected. Their shared future remains a promise rather than an accomplished escape, but the promise shows how they imagine family as mutual safety and continued presence.