At the tail end of the summer holiday, my son and I had a shouting match in King’s Cross station. For more than three hours on the train south from Durham, he’d been staring at a single question on a comprehension paper. The text began with a description of a road running through the moonlit countryside, and question three asked: ‘Why does the author compare the road to a grey silk ribbon?’

Between Durham and Peterborough, I had repeated that question, with increasingly psychopathic calm. ‘So darling, why does the author compare the road to a ribbon?’

You can’t measure a child’s enjoyment of a book but you sure can measure their fronted adverbials

You can’t measure a child’s enjoyment of a book but you sure can measure their fronted adverbials

By the time the Arsenal stadium came into sight, I could feel small things inside my brain starting to come loose and on platform 1 I lost my cool. ‘Just give me an answer, anything! Tell me it’s a metaphor, at least.’

‘I can’t think when you’re shouting at me.’

‘You’ve been thinking for hours.’

‘Mum, it’s a stupid question.’

The air was thick with city dust. The cat mewed pitifully in its travel box and the fight went out of me because my son was right. It was a stupid question. But there had been so many stupid questions. For the last few weeks of the holidays he’d been preparing for 11-plus exams and my frustration, I realised, was not with him but with the system and schooling of all........

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