THE FAIRGROUND

When the fair came to Glossop in the 1960s it was still one of the great events of the year. There was great excitement, not just among the children, but with the adult population as well.

The first sighting of one of the big trucks that brought the fair to town was second only to the arrival of the Christmas tree in the town square in early December.
The fair was something different, the fair held the promise of a little bit of wickedness in what was still a very rigid society. The fair was a solid representation of a time to have a bit of fun.

My dad loved the fair almost as much as mum hated it, this seemed to be the pattern in most families where the dads and children went off t the fair and the mothers all stayed at home, no doublt enjoying an equally rare bit of time to themselves.

When I was little dad took me to the fair. I'm not really sure if I was old enough to know what it was about, but off we went to the fair.

We went around the stalls, threw hoops at the prizes which always seemed just a shade too big to be encompassed by the rings, we shot real rifles at a parade of little, pock marked, yellow ducks we ate hot dogs, toffee apples, candy floss and some of the earliest sightings of the very exotic 'American hamburger.'

We also played darts. The idea with the game of darts was to get your three darts into playing cards so that you scored a number that was associated with a certain prize.

Dad threw three darts and almost won a prize, so he had another go and another and yet another, but the prizes remained elusive.

I wanted to throw some darts to see if I could win a prize and dad reluctantly handed over sixpence for another three darts and handed them to me.

There was something that dad didn't know, something that even I didn't know at the time and it was that I could not see anything outside of my grasp, that meant that anything over two feet away from me was so completely out of focus as to be in a fog, and it was getting worse. Not to put to fine a point on it, I was going blind and nobody knew, not even me, it was just normal to me and so I thought that everyone lived in a world where the fog was creeping in on them.

So, I got my darts and with all the strength I could muster I threw it into the air as hard as I could. It launced like a rocket in a science fiction film, straight up into the air in a great parobolic arc, it attained its zenith and started to come down and landed. It landed point down embedded in the top of the head of the man running the stall.
There was blood running down the man's head and into his eyes. Dad grabbed me by the hand and we made a hasty retreat.

It still didn't occur to my dad, or anyone else that I might not have seen the target and it was a good two or three years after that when it was eventually discovered that I could hardly see and that I was in danger of loosing my sight altogether. Even the fact that I had spent the first two and a half years at school with my nose almost touching the blackboard didn't seem to be a clue for the teachers.

It wasn't until the mobile optician came to the school that abyone had the slightest clue that I could hardly see.

I got glasses and the next time I went to the fair it probably saved many stallholders from the threat of serious injury.