Nanny Piggins and the Rival Ringmaster

About the book

When Nanny Piggins discovers some startling truths about the ruthless Ringmaster, the circus will never be the same. But she doesnít stop there, she also makes time to provide counselling to a Molavadinian princess with pre-wedding jitters, win a Nobel Prize while impersonating her sister and catch up with her favourite 4-tonne friend, Esmeralda the forgetful elephant.

The Adventures of Nanny Piggins

Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan

Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion

Nanny Piggins and the Accidental Blast-off

Nanny Piggins and the Rival Ringmaster

Nanny Piggins and the Pursuit of Justice

Nanny Piggins and the children were sitting around the dining table, eating breakfast with Mr Green. The children did not usually spend their Saturday mornings socialising with their father. In fact, if they could help it, they usually managed to go all the way from Friday afternoon when they came home from school, until Monday morning when they went back to school, without seeing him
at all. But in this particular instance they had been grounded.

Mr Green had caught them using his best silk ties as a rope ladder, so they could climb up on the roof and fetch the antique porcelain fruit plate they had been using as a frisbee. He had regretted the grounding as soon as the words had come out of his mouth, because he knew it would lead to unpleasant circumstances such as this – actually having to be in the same room as his children while he was eating, which made it very difficult for him to digest his food.

Normally, at this time on a Saturday morning, Derrick, Samantha and Michael would be off with their reprobate nanny – damming the local creek with rocks, testing an ultra-light aircraft they had made entirely from empty ice-cream containers, or harassing some poor retailer of baked goods – thus allowing Mr Green to eat breakfast and read the newspaper in total solitude, before sneaking off to his favourite place in the entire world – work. Instead, he was struggling to read the paper while his youngest son glared murderously at him, his daughter sighed loudly, his oldest son nervously jiggled the entire table with his leg and the nanny stared at him with such obvious malicious intent there was absolutely
no doubt in his mind she was thinking up ways to get revenge on him.

Mr Green was just about to send them all to their rooms so he could enjoy his bowl of lukewarm porridge in peace, when the silent hostility was violently interrupted by a loud SMASH, as a brick flew in through the window, sending broken glass everywhere and landing with a plop, right in the pot of porridge in the centre of the table.

‘What the devil was that?!’ demanded Mr Green.

‘It looked like a brick!’ said Derrick.

‘Yes, it’s definitely a brick,’ said Nanny Piggins as she peered into the pot. ‘On the bright side, it will probably improve the flavour of the porridge.’

‘What sort of hoodlum would throw a brick through a man’s window at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning?!’ demanded Mr Green. He was taking deep breaths and puffing himself up, ready to launch into a full rant about the evils of today’s youth.

‘There’s no need to blow things out of proportion. It’s only half a brick,’ said Nanny Piggins as she fished the half-brick out of the porridge. ‘Remember, children, if you do ever need to smash someone’s window with a brick, it is always better to use a half-brick because it is lighter and easier to throw longer distances. A full brick
does make a nicer mess, but you have to stand a lot closer to throw it, which means you have to be very confident that you can run faster than the recipient.’

The children nodded and mentally filed away this useful titbit of advice.

‘Put that brick down,’ demanded Mr Green. ‘It is evidence! The police will need to fingerprint it.’

‘I think they may have a hard time getting a fingerprint off a porridge-covered brick,’ said Derrick politely.

‘Besides, it’s going to be pretty easy to work out who threw it,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘because there’s a letter attached!’

Sure enough, when Nanny Piggins scraped away the bigger lumps of porridge, they could all see a thick crimson envelope tied to the brick with a purple ribbon.

‘Wow! That looks important,’ exclaimed Michael.

‘I know,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘Expensive stationery, a real wax seal and a genuine Tuscan-imported brick. Whoever threw it through our window is clearly trying to make an impression.’

‘Who would send such a thing?’ asked Samantha.

‘I know quite a few brick-hurling, stationery-loving egomaniacs. But there is only one lunatic with such a flare for the dramatic,’ said Nanny Piggins as she tore open the envelope. ‘The Ringmaster!’

Everyone gasped. Even Mr Green. (He had never met the Ringmaster, but he gathered from the situation that gasping was appropriate.)

‘What does he want?’ asked Derrick.

‘It’s an invitation,’ explained Nanny Piggins. ‘
You are cordially invited to attend the greatest feat of magic ever performed …’

‘What has cordial got to do with an invitation?’ asked Michael.

‘Perhaps they will be serving it to the guests,’ suggested Nanny Piggins, before continuing to read. ‘
Prepare to be astounded when, today at 12 noon on the Town Hall steps, I shall make a person entirely disappear. Hope to see you there. Love and kisses – The Ringmaster
.’

‘I didn’t know the Ringmaster could do magic!’ said Michael.

‘Strictly speaking I don’t think he could call himself a magician,’ explained Nanny Piggins. ‘But he has always been very good at making things disappear – money … difficult people … his entire circus, when the debt collectors come around.’

‘But if he is going to make someone disappear, why would he send
you
an invitation?’ asked Samantha.

‘Because he’s showing off, of course,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘The whole thing is just a publicity stunt for the circus. He’ll probably try to grab me and blast me out of a cannon, to give the event a bit of bang.’

‘So we’re not going to go?’ asked Derrick.

‘Of course we’re going to go!’ declared Nanny Piggins. ‘It would be rude not to when we’ve been invited, and on such expensive-looking stationery and masonry.’

‘But the children are grounded!’ blathered Mr Green.

‘Pish!’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘As nanny, I overrule your grounding!’

‘Can she do that?’ Michael whispered to Derrick.

‘Nanny Piggins can do anything,’ whispered Derrick.

‘On what grounds?’ asked Mr Green.

The children and Mr Green leaned forward, eagerly waiting to hear what creative excuse Nanny Piggins would come up with. Mr Green desperately hoped it was a good one. Even more than the children, he hoped that they would all just go away.

‘On the grounds that it is too good an educational experience to miss,’ concluded Nanny Piggins.

‘She’s right,’ agreed Derrick. ‘If the Ringmaster really does make someone vanish, this could be an important historical event.’

‘And a magic show is kind of like theatre, and theatre is educational,’ added Samantha.

‘And it will be good for us to know how to make a person disappear, in case we ever need to make it happen ourselves,’ concluded Michael (thinking about his maths teacher).

‘Yes, well then, of course, all right, I give my permission –’ began Mr Green.

He never got to finish his sentence because the children and Nanny Piggins had already fled the room, which was an enormous relief to Mr Green, as now he would be able to enjoy some peace and quiet without having to enforce that ridiculous debacle of a grounding. He might even be able to sneak out to the office for seven or eight hours for a spot of relaxing tax avoidance. Next time his children needed punishing, he really must remember to do something easy, like locking them in a broom closet. (He had spent many an hour locked in a broom closet as a boy and, apart from crippling his personality and giving him an irrational fear of brooms, it had done him absolutely no harm whatsoever.)

While Nanny Piggins and the children did run out of the room, they did not go straight down to the Town Hall. For a start, it was four hours until the event would occur. And secondly, they needed to find a really good disguise for Nanny Piggins, otherwise there was too great a risk that the Ringmaster would try to capture her and force her to resume her circus career as a flying pig.

So they went straight to their favourite costume hire shop. Nanny Piggins and the children always found it impossible to walk into a costume hire shop and spend any less than three hours in there. Particularly when they took Boris along with them. Being a ten-foot-tall dancing bear, he spent a lot of time in the corner weeping because none of the costumes fit him. But when he did find one made of sufficiently stretchy lycra that he could drag it over his 700-kilogram body, he would then be so delighted that he would leap up and perform a whole act of The Nutcracker (playing all the parts himself, including the nuts and the crackers).

When they eventually left the costume hire shop at 11.45 am, Nanny Piggins was completely
unrecognisable. She was dressed as a witch, and it was a very convincing disguise, because Nanny Piggins was such a tremendous actress. (It is a great injustice that she had never won an Academy Award. She did come close one year. But in the end the judges ruled that performances caught on convenience store security cameras could not be entered in the Academy Awards. Which is a great shame because her portrayal of an angry pig who wants her fifty cents back because the chocolate bar she had just bought had gone white on the outside after being improperly stored was very convincing.) No-one would believe that the withered old hag in the black dress and pointy hat could be someone as radiantly beautiful and glamorous as Nanny Piggins. Now that she had nothing to fear from unexpected abduction, they made their way over to the Town Hall steps.

When Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children arrived there was quite a crowd. Many of them were still holding the bricks their invitations had been wrapped around. The Ringmaster had obviously been very busy that morning (and the local glaziers would be very busy that afternoon). The steps of the Town Hall had been roped off and police were stationed all around to stop the crowd surging forward.

Nanny Piggins waved frantically at her old friend the Police Sergeant, yelling ‘Yoo-hoo, Police Sergeant’. But as he was standing next to his boss the Police Inspector and was not acquainted with any elderly witches, he just nodded politely and made a mental note to ring the local mental health facility to see if they’d had any recent escapes.

The thing that most caught the children’s eye was at the top of the steps. A glistening glass box, the size and shape of an old-fashioned telephone booth, was attached to a system of pullies dangling high above them from the Town Hall clock tower.

At noon, the Town Hall clock began to strike the hour. BONG … BONG … BONG …

The crowd held their breath, and the children grew nervous with excitement, but Nanny Piggins just rolled her eyes. ‘I do wish they would get on with it. If I had known they were going to faff about like this I would have tried on that Joan of Arc costume again.’

‘Armour suits you,’ agreed Boris.

‘And I do like the idea of getting a whole army to act out my dreams,’ added Nanny Piggins. ‘Particularly the one about me flying away on a giant purple dinosaur to a land where everything is made of strawberry marshmallows.’

‘BONG … BONG … BONG …’ continued the clock.

The crowd grew silent as they waited for the show to begin. And they were not disappointed. As soon as the clock struck its final BONG, air cannons blasted glitter into the sky, a cloud of smoke billowed out and fireworks shot forth in every direction as the Ringmaster leapt out through the Town Hall doors. ‘Good day, fair citizens, thank you all for coming!’ announced the Ringmaster.

‘Get on with it!’ heckled Nanny Piggins.

The Ringmaster turned and peered into the crowd. When he caught sight of the wizened witch, a huge smile broke across his face.

‘Sarah Piggins, darling! How good of you to come,’ smarmed the Ringmaster.

‘How did you know it was me?’ asked Nanny Piggins in surprise. ‘Have you been tracking me with satellites again? Or was there a GPS device in my chocolate?’

‘I recognised the children and Boris,’ explained the Ringmaster, ‘and I thought it unlikely that they would know two very rude, impatient, four-foot-tall women with that exact gorgeous hot pink handbag I have often seen you carrying.’

‘I told you you needed to rethink your accessories,’ said Boris.

‘Just get on with the conjuring trick,’ snapped Nanny Piggins, ‘so we can all go to the sweet shop and have some lunch.’

‘Very well,’ said the Ringmaster, turning to address the whole crowd again, ‘Today you shall be astounded to witness me make a human being entirely cease to exist on this corporeal plane!’

‘Blah blah blah,’ heckled Nanny Piggins. ‘We all read the invitation. We don’t need a recap. Just make somebody disappear.’

‘I shall do just that,’ said the Ringmaster. ‘But first I need a volunteer from the audience.’

The entire crowd of several hundred people simultaneously drew back. They might be silly enough not to have brick-proof windows, but they were not silly enough to voluntarily do anything with the Ringmaster.

‘Surely no-one will agree to that,’ whispered Michael.

‘Stop whispering,’ urged Nanny Piggins through unmoving lips. ‘If he sees your lips move he might take that as a sign of consent.’

At that moment a loud voice came clearly from the back of the crowd, ‘Get out of my way. Let me through!’

‘That voice sounds familiar,’ whispered Nanny Piggins.

‘We have a volunteer!’ exclaimed the Ringmaster.

The crowd parted, leaving a clear path.