Roger Moroney: It's over my head, whatever it is

This is a column of no fixed abode. It is about bombs, noises in the night, broccoli and Christmas trees.

I was about 9 or 10 when I first learned about the great bombs which fell on two large Japanese cities in 1945.

Pictures in a book showed landscapes utterly levelled.

One bomb?

But of course you are but a kid and they are just pictures ... and I'd seen other pictures from the war showing all sorts of big craters and fires and bandaged men looking grim in their scruffy field-hospital beds.

Although the effects of just one strange bomb, made of atoms or something, did pause my inattention span a little longer than normal.

It was what I read in the words that went with the picture that rattled me.

Apparently many of the survivors of the blasts from the great bombs had heard the aircraft which dropped them.

High up in the otherwise tranquil sky ... a distant hum of engines far above.

But the people below thought nothing of it, for one plane is not exactly a squadron of bombers, and there was really no reason for it to be up there, alone and droning, for any other reason than to be flying from somewhere ... to somewhere else.

So me, being of that slightly uncertain, impressionable, imaginative age started to stew on this whole aircraft thing.

Now big aircraft were not exactly a common sight in Hawke's Bay skies back then. We just had the DC3s and the Friendships coming and going ... but every now and then, high above in the sky, we would spot vapour trails.

And sometimes at night I would hear a single aircraft, high and distant in the dark sky and I would wonder who was on it and were they carrying something we didn't want to know about.

This was around the time Mr Kennedy was having a bit of a to-do with Mr Castro who had invited the Russians to park some of their missiles in his Havana backyard.

We were all teetering on the edge of World War III, the television news of the day told us.

When dad once remarked "it's getting a bit serious" then we knew it was ... getting a bit serious.

So those midnight planes, high above our little beds, frightened us.

I still listen to the sounds of high and distant aircraft in the night, and am still intrigued.

Not whether or not they're going to bomb us, but who is in Business Class and what's in the hold?

I have long been fascinated by the distant rumble of jet engines above in the night, so I did a little research.

We are beneath three international flight paths, where the users run at 11,000m.

There is the San Francisco/Los Angeles to Auckland service provided by Air New Zealand, the Buenos Aires to Auckland service run by Aerolineas Argentinas, and a military service from Hawaii to Christchurch (the USAF's Antarctica supply runs).

Now you can all sleep easy.

And so ... to the greens.

Not the save the snails mob ... broccoli.

I planted six of them back in early October and they are growing very well thus far. Their little heads are appearing now and I spend a lot of time out there weeding and watering and whatever.

Then I get told that there's a roadside garden out Pakowhai way selling heads of broccoli for 50 cents each. I'm growing three dollars' worth ... that'll dent the grocery budget.

No, hang on ... $2.50 because the big winds we had the other night have done for one of them.

If the price of chilli and capsicums ends up in the cents rather than dollars column, then I'm going to consider planting cocoa plants because their powdered leaves are worth big money in Mexico ... although I suspect they could be illegal.

May have to check on that.

Then again, I could plant Christmas trees, for that time of the year has (once again) descended and (once again) without warning.

Last year I spotted little pine trees selling for anywhere between $10 and $20.

I've got room to plant eight ... which means we can raise enough money to buy about 200 broccoli heads.

I'm really getting the hang of this whole finance thing.

Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.