Thanks for responses, gentlemen.
@Gloster: I kind-of feel that I could have been fairly accepting of sustaining honourable wounds -- but it seems to me mad, and unfair, that nobody did anything to teach me about the workings of the ritual in the course of which one got those wounds; and that I then got my head bitten off for not having realised that I ought to have, on my own initiative, gone to my schoolfellows for enlightenment about workings of said ritual (none of them had approached me, off their own bat, offering tuition).
Like you,
@Busaholic -- I basically, got an "anomalous" place -- scholarship-y kind of thing, under local-government aegis; otherwise, my parents would not (I think) have dreamed in a million years, of sending me to a public school -- likely, couldn't have afforded it anyway.
@Busaholic: I readily admit that lifelong -- unusually for a British male -- I have detested, and taken absolutely no interest in, sport in any aspect of it whatever (am not anti- those who enjoy it: knock yourselves out, guys -- just don't try to involve me). Inferring from your post: you were basically -- if selectively -- on board with the whole business; for me, pretty much the entirety of it was, start to finish, "from hell". (A slot was found cricket-wise for "swot" me, in the later parts of my school time, by making me scorer: the actual cricket doings bored me to tears, but I got a bit of satisfaction from the score-book-keeping and bureaucratic neatness and orderliness connected therewith.)
In the main, almost all forced-on-me sport-type doings at school were for me, torture; but as this stuff was compulsory for everyone, irrespective of willingness: since it was a school, one could be forgiven for expecting that the victims would be taught about the refinements of the workings of rack and thumbscrew, and the optimum responses thereto, and kindred matters. Unless it's me who am off-beam here. Some of this stuff came up in conversation between me and my mother, a year or so after I'd started in the school's preparatory department (Dad had died a couple of years earlier -- before any question arose, of my attending that seat of learning: I suspect that had he lived, he might well have said "no way", and pulled the plug on the while thing). Mum was staggered at my admission that, basically, we had got no instruction in sports and how they worked -- her reaction was pretty much, "what sort of scuzzy pretence at being a school, is this place that we've landed up sending you to?" In the light of responses received here, I'm wondering -- perhaps on this, it's Mum who was living in cloud-cuckoo-land; maybe standard practice is and has been, for schools
not to give formal instruction in sports and their rules -- pupils just left to flounder along and pick up (or not) "how it's done"?
Our school played football, but there were too many boys to create 11-player teams. I was slow at running, and clumsy at playing sport, so I regularly found myself in the leftovers reserves during the weekly "games period". Instead of finding us something useful to do, e.g. linesmen, the masters in charge just left us to "gossip" for the entire games period. Fortunately, one or two others were also interested in railways.
Unfortunately, the grammar school closed - merged with the nearby girls grammar school, then downgraded to a comprehensive.
The "temporary" wooden buidings were later destroyed by an arsonist, and the fine 17 acres of sports fields became a housing estate.
(It was not that I disliked sport, I just wasn't very good at football or "gym".)
Find self musing -- could it be that staff at all and any schools in which sport is, nominally, compulsory for all -- wish that in fact it could be optional: with those pupils who are interested and thus motivated to learn and co-operate, doing so; while the unwilling, who are a nuisance and impossible effectively to include or accommodate -- are taken out of the equation, and left to do what they like doing (even if that is nothing at all). In a similar way, I get the picture (not from any first-hand experience, thank heaven) that those in charge of armies, are in the main not very keen on peacetime "national service"-type conscription: because it tends to be that most of the "victims" thereof, are reluctant and resentful -- it's very much more productive to work with fewer recruits, who have joined up of their own free will, and are thus much likelier to be keen and co-operative, or at the worst, accepting of the consequences of their choice.