Many decades ago, I went to a mixed-sex primary school until I was 11, when I was sent to an all-girls school. I loved my primary school because the discipline was so lax – we got with almost anything. I especially enjoyed seeing fights in the playground and on the playing fields, which seemed to happen at least once every couple of days.
The sight of two boys ‘going at it’, usually rolling on the ground and hitting each other, stirred something in me that nothing else did. My friends and I used to form a little circle around two boys who seemed likely to fight and egged them on. The younger the fighters were, the less likely the playground monitor lady was to intervene.