Tommy’s animal sketchbook

Tommy’s animal sketchbook is a small notebook filled with intricate imaginary creatures, but its importance reaches beyond the drawings. It marks Tommy’s return to making art on his own terms after his earlier work at Hailsham became a source of ridicule, and it gives form to a hope that his creativity might matter to Madame. When Kathy sees the drawings, however, the notebook also becomes the focus of a painful misunderstanding between her, Tommy, and Ruth: its private pages expose how much trust Tommy has placed in his friends.

Origins and Making

Tommy begins the creatures after finding an old children’s book with its back cover missing behind a sofa at The Cottages. The idea is new, and at first he keeps it close: when he tells Kathy about the project in Norfolk, he says that he has not told anyone, not even Ruth, and that he has only made a start. By then he has persuaded Keffers to give him one of the little black notebooks in which Keffers scribbles figures. Tommy has completed at least a dozen creatures, though he has not yet shown Kathy any of them.

The change in scale is central to what he is attempting. The notebook’s small pages lead him to draw the animals tiny, a method he had not tried at Hailsham. Tommy explains that working at that scale changes the process: the creatures seem to come to life, and their size obliges him to consider details, including how they might protect themselves and reach things. He distinguishes this work from what he did as a child at Hailsham, where his drawings had contributed to his difficulties. The new approach does not simply repeat his earlier art in miniature; it gives him a different problem to solve and a reason to keep working.

Appearance and Technique

Kathy first sees the sketchbook in a goosehouse where Tommy has been drawing. Sunlight comes through the skylights; broken furniture has been pushed against a wall, and Tommy has dragged a worn two-seater settee into the middle of the floor. The setting is makeshift, but the drawings are anything but casual. Tommy tells Kathy that Ruth has already seen them, and that she is the only person who has, before inviting Kathy to look.

The pages initially resist easy recognition. Kathy had imagined smaller versions of the pictures the children made when they were young, but the creatures are densely worked and so full of minute structures that it takes a moment to see them as animals. Their surfaces resemble the opened interior of a radio: tiny canals, tendons, screws, and wheels appear with obsessive precision. Only when Kathy holds a page away does one resolve into an animal such as an armadillo or a bird. At the time of her visit, the second book is about a quarter full. Tommy mentions that there was a first book, but insists that nobody is to see it; he had needed time to get started.

The drawings combine mechanical intricacy with a quality Kathy finds sweet and vulnerable. Their internal-looking structures might at first make them seem like devices rather than living creatures, but the care invested in their imagined needs changes how she reads them. She recalls Tommy’s concern about how they could defend themselves or reach and fetch things. In that attention, the notebook registers not only his fascination with construction but also his effort to imagine what it takes for a small, exposed creature to manage in its surroundings.

The Gallery and the Decision to Share

Tommy’s work has a possible connection to his Gallery theory. He tells Kathy that he may put the animals forward if his theory about The Gallery is right, and initially treats the drawings as something he might someday show Madame. During Kathy’s visit, her offhand reference to Madame makes the possibility suddenly present between them. Tommy says he supposes he will need to improve a great deal before she sees anything. Kathy, who has by then become genuinely absorbed by the creatures, finds it hard to praise them at first; she worries that art could get him into trouble again and does not know how to judge work so unlike what the Hailsham guardians taught.

Tommy makes clear that the Gallery is not his only reason for drawing. He says that he simply likes making the animals, and wonders whether there is any reason to keep the project secret. He is not proposing to show every page to everyone, but he no longer wants secrecy to be automatic. Kathy finally tells him that the drawings are good and that hiding away to make them is unnecessary. Tommy says little, but Kathy recognizes that her approval has made him happy. The notebook thus holds two motives together without reducing one to the other: it may serve Tommy’s hopes about Madame, but the pleasure of making the creatures has value for him in its own right.

Exposure, Trust, and Aftermath

By the time Kathy later encounters Tommy and Ruth together, Ruth has heard about the Gallery theory and calls it Tommy’s big theory. Tommy explains that, if it is right, he could try submitting the animals. Ruth ridicules the idea that showing Madame his creatures might secure the outcome he hopes for. More damagingly, she tells Tommy that Kathy finds the animals laughable and urges him not to let other people know he is serious about them. Her words turn the private notebook into evidence in a conflict over what Kathy has said and what Tommy can believe.

Kathy does not defend herself. She recalls that she could have denied Ruth’s account, challenged the way Ruth had presented it, or comforted Tommy, but instead remains silent and leaves. Tommy’s anger gives way, for a moment, to an expression Kathy remembers as almost wonder; she cannot then make herself act on the recognition that he has been hurt. Years later, she continues to think about what she might have done. The sketchbook’s significance therefore changes across these scenes: first it is a concealed experiment, then a work Kathy learns to admire, and finally the object around which a failure of loyalty becomes visible. Its careful, protective creatures sharpen the contrast with Tommy’s own vulnerability when the pages and the hopes attached to them are exposed to ridicule.