Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang (3 page)

Martin Harrison is our First Assistant Director (see Glossary) and, apart from the Director, is really the most important person on the set. He’s just come up to me and said that when he first read the script he thought to himself, Oh, what a lovely simple story. He now realises that the lovely simple story is without a doubt the most complicated film he’s ever worked on. This is largely due to the preponderance of animals and children and also goes to prove once again that simple is never easy.

I am watching Oscar Steer, who, aged six, is our youngest actor apart from the piglets, who are only a month old. He is so clever and funny. He can even run in the mud.

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The Story 3

So now you know a bit about Phil and Rory. There’s just one other important thing I have to tell you. Rory adored his children and would spend hours making things for them. The best thing he’d ever made was a machine called the Scratch-O-Matic. He’d had the idea one long summer’s day as he was watching Vincent scratching the piglets with the end of a broom. Piglets love being scratched and they would jostle each other for position under Vinnie’s broom handle. Vinnie would try and scratch each piglet equally but inevitably the strongest ones would get the most attention and then it would be suppertime and Vinnie would have to go indoors complaining that the littlest piggies had been left out. Mr Green sat up all night with a huge bit of paper and a pencil, then spent an entire day in the barn sawing and hammering and occasionally letting out great bellows of rage when something had gone wrong with his calculations. Then he came in and went to sleep so soundly in front of the fire that Mrs Green just left him there for the night. In the morning, he was up and about before anyone, and when the rest of the family had come downstairs for breakfast, he proudly announced that he had something special to show them all. Consumed with curiosity, the children and Mrs Green followed him into the barn, where a sheet had been flung over a gigantic structure right in front of the pigsty. Pink with pride, Mr Green whipped away the sheet to reveal an amazing machine. It all started with a bicycle seat and pedals. You sat on the seat and pedalled, and all at once a great system of levers and cables whooshed into action. The cables controlled the levers, which controlled a selection of brushes and sticks and broom-handles which all moved about as music came out of a great gramophone horn. Each little pig was settled under a brush and scratched to its heart’s content as it listened to whatever music you fancied putting on to the record player, which is an old-fashioned term for a sort of iPod. All the children said the Scratch-O-Matic was the cleverest invention since sliced bread, and Vincent in particular thought it was the finest thing he’d ever seen in his life.

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All this just goes to show that Mr Green was dad-tastic and the idea of him having to leave home and go off to fight and maybe even get hurt made them all thoroughly miserable.

On the morning of his departure, everyone saw him up to the top of the lane and waved him off as he disappeared round the corner. They shouted and jumped and made loads of noise. As soon as he’d gone from view everyone fell silent. Mrs Green looked at the three sad faces.

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‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Dad’ll want something sweet when he comes home so let’s make him some strawberry jam. I’ve saved up sugar specially for it!’

This idea rather cheered the children up, so they went back home, picked strawberries and made a really gorgeous pot of jam for Mr Green’s return. Megsie made the frilly top and tied the ribbon and Vincent drew the label with more care than usual. Mrs Green put it in its own special corner of the pantry shelf. Every day from then on, Vincent would go and check to see it was safe and hadn’t been eaten by mice.

The Diary 4

It’s Day Two and raining hard. No strawberries here, that’s for sure. All the wheels on the cameras and lights get stuck in the mud and we work at least 30 per cent slower than usual. Phil Sindall, our Camera Operator (see Glossary), is sitting on the Dolly (see Glossary) with his forehead resting on the eyepiece. He is meditating while he waits. There is no one who has to be more patient than a Camera Operator, and there is no Camera Operator more patient than Phil. It’s a bit like having Buddha on the set.

There’s absolutely nothing going on here.

I suppose I’d better just get on with the story.

The Story 4

The days and weeks went by and were filled with all the usual chores and with Mrs Green’s job. She worked at the village shop, which was owned and run by a frantically old lady called Mrs Docherty. It was a lovely shop, full of coloured drawers, and ladders in case you needed anything from ‘up top’. In the olden days, Mrs Docherty had colour-coded everything. Lentils went in the orange drawer, knicker elastic in the pink drawer and tap washers in the grey drawer, that sort of thing. But she had forgotten what colour was for what years ago and now everything was jumbled in, higgledy-piggledy. Mrs Green knew the shop inside out though and could always find you exactly what you wanted. She loved Mrs Docherty but had to admit that failing memory and eyesight did render her something of a liability. Mrs Green was apt to find soap snuggled in with oats (which had a slightly carbolic aftertaste as a result) and, on one occasion, rice mixed up with the ball-bearings. It wasn’t easy.

All the children wrote lots of letters to their father and so did Mrs Green, and they would normally get a lovely letter back, always from a different place. Once they had even got a letter from Africa, and Mrs Green had said to the children that at least it was nice that their dad was getting to see a bit of the world. But for the past few months, they had written and written and got no reply.

That morning, the postman had come to the door with a letter which caused huge excitement. But it wasn’t one of the little blue envelopes they were used to receiving from their father. It was a letter made of thick cream parchment paper, the sort of stuff you don’t expect to see except in castles. The writing on it was elegant and sloping and it smelled very faintly of bergamot.

All the children were very curious about it indeed and crowded about Mrs Green as she carefully opened the envelope.

‘Oh!’ she said, and sat back in her chair, staring at the beautiful paper in perplexity.

‘What, what?’ said Megsie. ‘Can I look?’

Mrs Green handed her the letter and explained to the others that her sister, Prunella (about whom you know so much but Norman, Megsie and Vincent knew next to nothing) was worried about bombs dropping in London and was going to send her two children to stay in the country with the Greens.

It was all very sudden.

Mrs Green was perfectly astonished because after she’d been cut off without a penny, she’d only seen her sister once. Prunella, who was now Lady Gray, had made the journey from London to the farm in a pale blue Rolls-Royce. When she’d arrived she’d been so appalled by the mud in the yard and the presence of grubby animals and germ-ridden poultry that she’d decided simply to roll down her window and chat to Mrs Green from the safety of the Rolls. This, as you can imagine, did not lead to a very intimate or sisterly conversation and, after a very short while, Prunella had rolled up her window again and gone back to London, overcome by what she saw as the squalor of her sister’s home. Mrs Green had been equally appalled by the ridiculously expensive car and the fact that Prunella had been wearing a sapphire tiara during the daytime.

She certainly hadn’t expected her sister to send her very own children to a place like Deep Valley Farm.

But so it appeared.

Megsie, Norman and Vincent were thrilled. New blood! People to play with! People to share the chores with! Rich people who might have access to chocolate!

‘When are they coming, then?’ asked Norman, pulling on his wellies, which, as usual, were damp inside. (I hate that.)

‘Next Tuesday,’ said Mrs Green, doing up Vincent’s shoelaces and putting on her coat inside out. ‘We’ll have to tidy.’

The Diary 5

I’ll stop there for a minute because no one’s interested in tidying, for crying out loud. Let them get on with it. It’s raining really hard here now. All the children are ready for their close-ups. The poor chickens are sitting in the pretend mud, which is getting thinner and thinner because of the rain. Devil is still too fat to work and Beryl has gone on hunger strike. If it goes on like this we certainly won’t survive the next three and a half months.

Jackie Durran, our costume designer, has come to show me my khaki uniform. She is an absolute genius, who wears mad hats and invents all these brilliant things for people to wear, like Mrs Green’s costumes, which all remind me of a cottage garden. You’ll hear about the khaki uniform later in the story.

But wait! The pattering upon the plastic roof of my palatial trailer (it has pelmets) has stopped! Chris Stoaling, our Second AD (see Glossary), has knocked and said we’re off to shoot the arrival of the Rolls-Royce. Massively exciting. I am going to pull on wellies and rush down there to get in the way.

My wellies, by the way, are never damp inside. That’s because my Dresser (see Glossary), Helen Ingham, makes sure they are clean and toasty every day. Only the actors are cared for in this way – everyone else has to wash their own wellies. Helen, or ‘H’ as she is known, is very funny. We giggle a lot.

Just arrived. Oh, it’s started to rain again. Everyone’s standing about in the mud looking glum. We’re not shooting the arrival of the Rolls-Royce. Massively boring. Better get on with the story then. There’s nothing else to do . . .

Might call this bit Chapter Two. Why not? It has a nice ring to it.

The Story 5

Chapter Two. The day before the arrival of the Gray children, everyone got a bit tense. The children had been too excited to sleep and had woken up grumpy as a consequence. Vincent was feeling resentful because Norman had made him promise to wash the bedclothes with Megsie instead of scratching the piglets. He’d been stewing on this for ages and finally decided to do something really naughty and steal Norman’s last sweetie from the secret tin.

I had better explain something here; I don’t know about you but I wasn’t really allowed sweeties when I was little. My dad used to buy us a sixpenny ice-lolly on a summer Sunday but that was pretty much it. Perhaps because of this I wanted and loved sugar in all its forms more than anything else in the world. The situation for the Green children was similar because during the war there was hardly any sugar in the whole country and certainly not enough for people to have sweeties every day. They were allowed about two ounces of sugar a week per family, which is about one bite of a Mars Bar. To share. So you can imagine, after a few months of that, the very thought of a sweetie would just about drive you mad with desire. So mad that you might consider stealing someone’s last one, especially if you were cross with the person to whom it belonged. Vincent was
very
cross with Norman, so he crept into the best parlour, climbed up on to the dresser, took the secret tin down and opened it. There, at the bottom, was the last sweetie. A lemon drop. Not, you might think, the most exciting sweetie in the world, but for all the reasons I have just mentioned, the thing that Vincent wanted more than life itself. He took it out, replaced the tin, got down from the dresser and then made his one mistake. A fatal mistake. He decided to open the sweetie there and then. As any fool knows, all children can hear the rustling of sweetie paper from a distance of several miles. This applies even if children get regular sup- plies and aren’t in the deprived condition of the Greens. So the moment Vincent started to unwrap the lemon drop, Megsie, who was outside milking Geraldine, heard, dropped the milk bucket and raced inside. Norman was oiling the tractor in the barn and, despite being several hundred metres away from the wrapper
and
whistling to himself, heard as well and headed straight for the best parlour, roaring, ‘Who’s eating my last sweetie?!’