The fifth Schoolbook is well conserved with all forty original pages in place and the various interior clippings undisturbed. Spanning over the forty-five days that drew 1990 to a close, the initial pages date from the earliest days of that year's December. These preliminary leaves content themselves to facsimile the animistic representations evident in Extraneous Drawings #48-54.
Emergent as if the fledging diarist was charting the callous depths of her melancholy, the succession of totems in both the pages of the fifth Schoolbook and the accompanying Extraneous Drawings devoted to the pets that sentry the Jelish grounds function in drawing the young Jelish back to the delights of the exterior world. One points to these drawings as the harmonizing counterpart to the earlier frottages that plague the latter pages of School Sketchbook three (SSB.3). These examples underline an ardent desire on the part of the nascent prodigy to transgress the tomb-like confines of her anguish.
As with the previous document's integument, the fifth Schoolbook's bindings remain blank but for a collection of small stickers. These markers stem from a Boxing Day trip across southern Kent to a holiday camp, an excursion that sought to provide a necessary geographical dislocation, as occurred in the outing to the zoo taken in late October, for the Jelish offspring to be able to start anew.
Rather than participate in the frivolous activities that the rest of her brood embarked upon (for this was Pontins), Naomi sought the more soulful venture of respite through the re-channelling of artistic inspiration. Detailing the Friesians that rambled in the fields beyond the holiday camp, the young artist's pencil bears testimony to the multitude of poses the cows adopt in their daily activities. That such an innocuous resource could procure such poetics is surely due to the young scholar's gift in contrasting the mother with suckling calf with the adjacent reach of her younger brother, Matthew, reaching for the door. This contrariety underlines the quandary at the artist's core: the need to escape the confines of her grief but the lack of a parent to provide the necessary support to achieve this goal. It comes as little surprise that the remaining leaves of the document are left void. A full stop has been emphatically stamped.