Nanny Piggins and the Pursuit of Justice (7 page)

‘I’m calling a doctor,’ said the 29-year-old, taking out a mobile phone.

‘Colonel, confiscate his phone,’ ordered Nanny Piggins.

The Colonel loved following orders, especially from his favourite pig, so he soon had the 29-year-old in a painful wristlock, forcing him to drop the phone to the floor, where Mr Bernard crushed it with several lusty blows from his oxygen stand.

‘What are you doing?’ asked the 29-year-old.

‘I’m taking over this old people’s home and
turning it into a five-star gourmet restaurant,’ announced Nanny Piggins.

The old people cheered.

‘You can’t do that,’ protested the 29-year-old.

‘Why not?’ demanded Nanny Piggins.

‘You can’t start a restaurant without business models, cash flow assessments and market analysis,’ babbled the 29-year-old.

‘Pish!’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Just you watch me.’

So Nanny Piggins set to work transforming the Golden Willows Retirement Home. She put Mrs Hastings in charge as restaurant manager, because any woman who could stage a bank robbery obviously had excellent planning skills. She made Mrs Clemenceau head chef, Mr Lessandro sous chef, and Mrs Broomfield chief chef in charge of jammy dodgers. Then Nanny Piggins forced the 29-year-old to become maître d’.

‘But I’m an investment banker,’ protested the 29-year-old. ‘I can’t spend the whole day away from the office.’

‘It’ll do you good,’ said Nanny Piggins as she lifted the car keys from his pocket. ‘The people you
work for are obviously profoundly morally bankrupt if they invest in old people’s homes as a moneymaking scheme. You’re much better off here, away from their corrupting influence.’

‘But I want to be corrupted,’ protested the 29-year-old, ‘so I can make a lot of money and retire at 40.’

‘Trust me,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You’ll be fat, bald and well on the way to a terminal heart condition by forty. You’ll be much better off if you start living your life today.’

And by the end of the week the Golden Willows Restaurant had people lining up around the block, desperate to try their delicious food. It turns out that there was a huge market of young people eager to try forbidden ingredients they had only heard of – like butter and cream – as well as a huge market of old people who could still remember the magical taste of their grandmother’s cooking.

Even the 29-year-old had a good time. He found he was much better at seating guests and fetching drinks than he was at insider trading.

And after dinner every night the old people put on a show. All the dinner guests were invited outside to watch the Colonel launch his flying machine and do a turn around the garden. Sometimes he
made it all the way around and back to the window and sometimes he crashed into the next door neighbour’s sycamore tree; either way it was always spectacular.

The only downside was, by the end of the week, Nanny Piggins had also made herself totally redundant. The Golden Willows Restaurant was a thriving independent business and she was back in a probation officer’s office, having only completed sixty-seven hours of community service.

‘Oh dear, Nanny Piggins,’ said the probation officer. ‘If you’re going to whittle away your 5000-hour community service requirement you are going to have to resist the urge to transform every institution I send you to into a huge profitgenerating organisation.’

‘I’m sorry,’ apologised Nanny Piggins. ‘I just can’t help myself. It comes from being so very good at everything.’

But the children were not at all sorry. They were happy to get their nanny back, at least for a short while, until the probation officer could find another suitable (or unsuitable) job for Nanny Piggins.

N
anny Piggins had never been so bored in her life. When she agreed to chaperone the children’s school excursion as part of her community service, she had assumed they would be going somewhere interesting like a scorpion farm, or a hot air balloon race, or at the very least, a cake factory. But no, Headmaster Pimplestock had organised it, so they were traipsing around The National Transport Museum. To Nanny Piggins’ way of thinking, museums were boring at
the best of times, but to have an entire museum that only featured different forms of transport was too boring to be true. If she had to look at another train or bus while the curator droned on and on about ‘kilowatts’ and ‘torque’, she was sure she would slip into a coma.

The worst part was that the museum was supposed to be about transport but there was not a single room devoted to the history of the flying pig! Her own life story would be a thousand times more interesting than Adrian Krinklestein’s, the inventor of the cog, and he had a whole display.

On top of that, the children were being forced to fill out a ridiculous questionnaire written by Headmaster Pimplestock to prove that they had listened to every word the curator said. Which totally prevented them from ignoring the curator and nipping off to the coffee shop for a few slices of cheesecake with their nanny.

So Nanny Piggins was standing there, in a room full of antique Victorian water pumps, trying to keep herself awake by thinking up new recipes for chocolate ice-cream (perhaps more chocolate?), when something caught her eye. Through a doorway at the far end of the room she caught a glimpse of something red and shiny. Without thinking, her
trotters were drawn towards it.

‘Where are you going?’ whispered Samantha as her nanny began to wander away.

‘As far away from that dreadful curator as possible,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘Then I’m coming too,’ said Michael, dumping his questionnaire in a bin.

Derrick followed, reasoning he was the oldest so it would be irresponsible to let his little brother get in trouble all alone.

And Samantha chased after them because, much as she did not want to get in trouble, she did not like being the one left behind to answer the angry and difficult questions.

So Nanny Piggins and the children left the dreary Victorian water-pump room and entered a huge airy pavilion with a high glass ceiling, so they could see the sunshine and blue sky above. But that was not the best thing about the room. The best thing was that it was chock full of dozens and dozens of aeroplanes. There were modern jets, old propeller planes and funny looking water planes. Some hung from the ceiling, some stood up on pedestals and some were parked on the ground. But the brightest and shiniest of all was the one Nanny Piggins had spotted first. It was a bright red World War I tri-
plane with German insignia, so it was much
much
more exciting than a Victorian water pump.

‘What a pretty machine,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a German fighter plane from the first World War,’ explained Derrick. (He had been forced to study World War I only the previous term.)

‘That’s a plane?’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘I don’t believe it. Where does everybody sit?’

‘Well, the pilot sits there and the passenger sits there,’ said Derrick, pointing to the two openings in the chassis.

‘But where does the stewardess sit? And how does she get the drinks cart up and down?’ asked Nanny Piggins, totally baffled.

‘I don’t think they had drinks carts on World War I fighter planes,’ said Samantha.

‘No drinks carts!’ exclaimed a horrified Nanny Piggins. ‘Next you’ll be telling me they didn’t serve an in-flight meal!’

‘Well . . .’ began Samantha.

‘No in-flight meal!’ gasped Nanny Piggins. ‘No wonder they were at war. They must have been so unhappy.’ Nanny Piggins leaned her trotter on the wing of the plane, then immediately recoiled. ‘This isn’t a real plane! It’s a fake!’ cried Nanny
Piggins.

‘It is?’ said Michael, totally delighted. He enjoyed it when his nanny started denouncing people. And discovering a forgery was sure to lead to a lot of denouncing.

‘Listen,’ continued Nanny Piggins, rapping the wing of the plane again. ‘It’s hollow and I think it’s made of
canvas
!’

‘Maybe planes were made of canvas back in the old days,’ suggested Samantha.

‘Don’t be ridiculous! What would happen if it rained?’ said Nanny Piggins.

Samantha had the mental image of a plane all limp and floppy like a wet beach towel.

‘No, someone must have stolen the real plane and replaced it with this canvas replica,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Well, there’s only one way we can find out for sure.’

‘Call the police and ask them to bring down a forensic team to carbon date the material?’ suggested Derrick.

‘No, turn it on and see if it flies,’ declared Nanny Piggins.

‘Oh no,’ said Samantha, sitting down on the ground and taking out her lunch. Not so she could eat anything, but so she could use the brown paper
bag to hyperventilate into.

‘But that’ll never work,’ protested Derrick.

‘Why not?’ asked Nanny Piggins as she walked around the plane, kicking the chocks out from in front of the wheels. ‘This is a museum, isn’t it? They are supposed to have restored everything to perfect working condition.’

‘But would there still be petrol in the engine?’ asked Michael.

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘When the Germans lost the war I expect they had a lot more important things to think about than whether or not they had siphoned all the petrol out of their planes. Anyway, we’ll soon see.’ Nanny Piggins hopped into the pilot’s seat.

‘Oh dear,’ moaned Samantha as she ducked her head between her knees – partly to avoid fainting and partly so she would not have to see her beloved nanny come to harm.

‘Oh look!’ said Nanny Piggins delightedly. ‘The German flying ace who last used this plane left his goggles under the seat. How thoughtful of him.’

Nanny Piggins put on the goggles and revved the engine.

‘It can’t be a fake, that engine sounds fine,’ said Derrick.

‘Oh, we won’t know for sure until we take it up,’
said Nanny Piggins.

‘Up where?’ asked Michael. Even he was beginning to worry, and generally he was the least inclined to worry of any boy you could care to meet.

‘For a spin,’ said Nanny Piggins with a joyous glint in her eye.

The children had seen that glint before. Nanny Piggins always got it before she threw herself into one of her death-defying stunts, such as being fired out of a cannon, doing a backflip off the clothes line or returning a library book two days late.

‘Do you even know how to fly an aeroplane?’ asked Derrick.

‘I am the greatest flying pig in all the world,’ Nanny Piggins reminded him.

‘Yes, but the principles are rather different when you haven’t been blasted out of a cannon,’ argued Derrick.

‘Pish!’ said Nanny Piggins, and with that she opened the throttle, released the brake and the plane started to roll forward.

At this point the security guard from the museum started running towards them. (Now you might be wondering why he had not taken action sooner, such as when Nanny Piggins turned on the noisy diesel engine of their 95-year-old German tri-plane. But
you have to understand that the security man was a little deaf and he had fallen asleep while lip-reading the curator’s incredibly boring talk on Victorian water pumps taking place in the next room.) But an elderly man with a heart condition was never going to run down Nanny Piggins in an aeroplane.

She shot down the full length of the hall (which was perfectly safe because the museum was so boring there were no members of the public for her to crash into) and then, just as Samantha hid her face in her jumper because she did not want to see Nanny Piggins slam into a brick wall, the plane took off. And as it lifted up into the air, the tri-plane transformed from a rickety old thing banging along the ground, into an elegant flying machine soaring through the sky. Well, as much sky as there was inside the room. Luckily for Nanny Piggins it was a huge room so she could comfortably do loops around and around.

‘Stop that pig!’ screamed the curator as he ran into the pavilion.

‘How?’ asked the befuddled security guard.

‘Do I have to do everything myself?’ complained the curator, and with that he leapt into a World War I British bi-plane, turned on the engine and took off after Nanny Piggins.

Goodness knows what he thought he could do
to get Nanny Piggins to come down. They might have left petrol in the engines but the restoration team did have the sense to remove the bullets from the machine guns. So all the curator could do was chase Nanny Piggins around and around, which she rather enjoyed. She did loop-the-loops and barrel rolls and weaved in between all the planes hanging from the ceiling to confuse him. Then Nanny Piggins flew towards the sun so the curator would lose sight of her, before reappearing behind him, blowing raspberries.

Down on the ground all the school children cheered. The most boring school excursion had turned into the world’s most exciting school excursion in just a few short moments.

Nanny Piggins eventually landed voluntarily when the plane ran out of petrol and started to sputter. She glided to a perfect landing, yanking on the handbrake and rolling the tri-plane to a halt in exactly the same position she had found it.

Unfortunately the curator was not such an adept pilot. When he tried to land he came in too fast, skidded all the way along the floor (making a mess of the patina) and slamming into the refrigerated cake stand out the front of the cafeteria, totally ruining the New York cheesecake Nanny Piggins had her
eye on for afternoon tea, which so horrified Nanny Piggins that she actually started to cry. Fortunately, licking bits of New York cheesecake off the sides of the smashed refrigerated cake stand soon cheered her up.

Many hours later, when Nanny Piggins and the children were finally allowed home, they were not in the highest of spirits. True, Nanny Piggins had not been taken away to jail, which was a good thing. (The museum had decided not to press charges because they did not want an inquiry into why two of their aeroplanes on public display had petrol in their engines.) But they had insisted that she pay for the damages, which seemed bitterly unfair given that she had not caused any herself. It was the curator who had smashed the expensive refrigerated cake stand. But Nanny Piggins did feel bad about ruining a contraption whose sole purpose was displaying cake in ideal conditions, so she agreed to these terms.

‘Where are we going to get twenty-thousand dollars?’ asked Derrick.

‘We could ask father to lend it to us,’ suggested
Samantha, and they all burst out laughing at such a ridiculous suggestion.

‘But seriously, children,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘We do need a money-making scheme.’

‘We could get jobs,’ suggested Michael.

‘Dear child,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Things are bad, but they’re not that bad.’

‘We could sell something,’ suggested Derrick.

‘Probably not wise,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I think your father is beginning to be suspicious. I sold his antique four-poster bed last week. And he has been muttering about his room not looking quite the way it did. No, what we need is a money-making scheme.’

The children scratched their heads and thought hard, but they did not know much about money-making schemes. Derrick had a vague idea that they had something to do with asking people to lend you money, then taking all that money and running away on holiday. (Which just goes to show Derrick actually knew everything you need to know about running a hedge fund.)

‘Aha! I’ve got it!’ declared Nanny Piggins, leaping up from the sofa. ‘I am going to become a fortune teller.’

The children were not entirely convinced that
becoming a fortune teller was an easy way to make twenty-thousand dollars. But Nanny Piggins seemed even more chipper than usual as she set up a miniature circus tent on the footpath outside the front of the house.

‘Michael, run and fetch the “Nanny Wanted” sign from the garage,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘You’re not going to hire a new nanny, are you?’ asked a horrified Michael.