"I did it at their age"

You remember being nine. You had your kit. You were dressed and ready. Nobody had to tell you three times, and if they had, you'd have listened, because that's the sort of child you were.

Two things about that memory. The first is that it's a memory, made now, from fragments, by an adult, and what it's missing is exactly the thing this book is about. You don't remember the reminders, because the reminders weren't events. Your mother saying "kit" as you went upstairs isn't a thing you'd have stored. The bag she packed the night before, the list on the fridge you never noticed was a list, the way she stood at the bottom of the stairs at twenty past eight every day so that you couldn't leave without passing her. All of that was the arrangement your parents built, and from inside it, it was invisible, because that's what a good arrangement is. You experienced yourself as a child who remembered things. You were a child in a house that had been set up so that you would.

The second is that you can check. Ask your parents, if you can, what you were like at nine. Ask them whether you remembered your kit. In my experience the answer is a laugh and a story about the recorder, or the swimming things, or the time the whole class went on a trip and you were the one with no packed lunch. Every parent believes they were more organised at nine than their child is, and every grandparent knows better.

There's a version of this belief that's true, and it's worth separating out. Some children are more organised than others at the same age, and you may have been one of them. Children vary, and Gathercole's line has a spread around it. But the spread is around a line that rises with age, and even the most organised nine-year-old is a nine-year-old, and the comparison you're making is between your child and a reconstruction of yourself that has had the reminders edited out.

There's one more thing in the memory, which is that it was a different house. Fewer things on the shelf, probably. No tablet at half past seven. A school that started later or a parent who didn't leave for work at the same moment. The nine-year-old you remember being was operating in conditions you can't fully recall and probably wouldn't recognise, and comparing a child in this morning to a child in that one is comparing two mornings and calling the difference a boy.

The standard has been set against a child who never existed. The real one had a mother at the bottom of the stairs.