Kathy begins carer training and leaves the cottages

Kathy’s decision to begin carer training is the quiet break that ends her time at The Cottages and sets the course for nearly twelve years of caregiving. Made without ceremony after a period of worsening tension with Ruth and Tommy, it shifts Kathy from a resident imagining her future among them to someone preparing to leave—and ultimately gives her a way back into the lives of both friends.

Decision and Departure

After a walk back to The Cottages that left the friends’ usual gestures of closeness absent, Kathy made up her mind and did not reconsider. One morning she approached Keffers in the yard. His Wellingtons were muddy, he was carrying a piece of piping, and he was grumbling to himself. Kathy told him she wanted to start training as a carer. He reacted as if she had interrupted him over firewood and directed her to return that afternoon to complete the forms. The ordinariness of the exchange contrasts with the importance of the choice: the decision was decisive for Kathy, but its first administrative step was almost casual.

The training did not begin instantly, yet the process had been set in motion. Kathy says she began to see The Cottages and everyone there differently: she was now one of those who would leave. Ruth may have expected long conversations about Kathy’s future or hoped to influence her decision, but Kathy kept her distance from both Ruth and Tommy. They did not properly resume their conversations at The Cottages before Kathy was saying goodbye. The departure was therefore not simply a change of residence; it also opened a stretch of separation from the people with whom she had grown up.

From Training to a Long Career

In retrospect, Kathy measures the consequence of that choice in years. At thirty-one, she has been a carer for more than eleven years and is expected to continue for another eight months, bringing her service to almost exactly twelve years. She does not treat the length of her tenure as proof that she is uniquely capable: some good carers are stopped after two or three years, while another remains for fourteen despite being, in Kathy’s estimation, poor at the work. Still, she knows her work has pleased those responsible for it, and she takes pride in her donors’ recovery times and in how rarely they are classified as agitated, even before a fourth donation.

Kathy describes caregiving as skilled emotional attention rather than mechanical service. She has developed an instinct for when to stay and comfort a donor, when to leave them alone, when to listen, and when to answer distress with a bracing word. That attention has limits: carers can be worn down and do not possess unlimited patience or energy. Kathy’s account thus places the training decision at the beginning of both a vocation and its cost. She has done her share of caring for donors from many backgrounds, but the work becomes harder without a deeper personal connection.

Choosing Donors and Recovering Old Bonds

Only during the final six years of her career has Kathy been allowed to choose whom she cares for. She recognizes that this privilege can prompt resentment, particularly because she has a bedsit and a car and is a former Hailsham student. Others may think she selects only her own kind and therefore benefits from easier or more familiar cases. Kathy concedes that there may be something in the criticism, while noting that she cared for donors from many different places before she was permitted to choose.

The choice also enables a personal return. Kathy says she could not have continued for so long if she had stopped feeling for the donors in her care, and wonders how she could have become close again to Ruth and Tommy if she had never begun choosing. Ruth was only the third or fourth donor Kathy selected. Ruth already had an assigned carer, so Kathy remembers needing some nerve to arrange the change. When she saw Ruth again at the Dover recovery centre, their differences did not disappear, but the fact that they had grown up together at Hailsham—and shared memories no one else possessed—mattered more. Kathy says that reunion led her to seek out donors from her past, especially people from Hailsham, whenever she could.

Care, Separation, and the Promise to Ruth

The departure from The Cottages did not resolve the strains between the three friends; it began a period in which Kathy’s care for them had to cross the distance between their lives. Later, when she was Ruth’s carer, their relationship again became difficult. A rumor about a stranded boat gave them something to talk about: Kathy had heard of it from donors in North Wales, and when Ruth raised it, Kathy encouraged her to continue. The small opening matters against the background of their strained visits, where even routine checks could pass in silence and Kathy considered giving up as Ruth’s carer.

At the end of Ruth’s life, the old decision to enter caregiving acquires its most intimate consequence. Three days after Ruth’s second donation, Kathy was admitted to the hospital room where Ruth lay alone, conscious but largely inaccessible through pain. Kathy sat beside the metal bed, held Ruth’s hand in both of hers, and stayed as long as permitted. During a brief moment of recognition, Ruth looked directly at her. Kathy understood the unspoken request and promised to become Tommy’s carer as soon as she could. The promise links her professional role to a private obligation formed through shared childhood and loss.

That care later brings its own boundary into view. As Tommy approaches his fourth donation, he asks Kathy whether she ever tires of being a carer or wishes that her own notice would arrive. Their conversation follows his fear that donors are not told for certain whether they will complete, and Kathy has dismissed his speculation about what might follow a fourth donation without having evidence to reassure him. Her training began as a decision to leave The Cottages; the long career that followed places her beside donors at moments when neither professional attention nor intimacy can remove the uncertainty of what lies ahead.