Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro

It’s a bit too much like a conspiracy theory for me—I don’t think our guardians were that crafty—but there’s probably something in it. Certainly, it feels like I always knew about donations in some vague way, even as early as six or seven. And it’s curious, when we were older and the guardians were giving us those talks, nothing came as a complete surprise. It was like we’d heard everything somewhere before. One thing that occurs to me now is that when the guardians first started giving us proper lectures about sex, they tended to run them together with talk about the donations. At that age—again, I’m talking of around thirteen—we were all pretty worried and excited about sex, and naturally would have pushed the other stuff into the background. In other words, it’s possible the guardians managed to smuggle into our heads a lot of the basic facts about our futures. Now to be fair, it was probably natural to run these two subjects together. If, say, they were telling us how we’d have to be very careful to avoid diseases when we had sex, it would have been odd not to mention how much more important this was for us than for normal people outside. And that, of course, would bring us onto the donations.