Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan (3 page)

‘Are you going to tap-dance for us again, Nanny Piggins?’ asked Phillip, who was serving two years for stealing his grandmother’s wheelchair and taking it for a joyride.

‘No, you were such good hosts last time I visited, I just popped in to see if you’d like to share morning tea at our home,’ said Nanny Piggins with her most gracious hostess smile.

‘What?!!!’ exploded Derrick and Samantha.

Michael did not say anything. He was too busy rushing back up the tunnel to hide his teddy bear.

‘You can’t invite them over,’ said Samantha with some difficulty because she was trying to talk out the
side of her mouth while still smiling at the men.

‘Why not?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘Because they’re prisoners. They aren’t allowed to leave,’ explained Derrick.

‘Piffle, I’m sure no-one will mind if we bend the rules a little,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘But that’s the whole point of prison. You have to stay in no matter what,’ said Samantha.

‘Even if there’s a half-price chocolate sale at the supermarket?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘Even then,’ confirmed Derrick

‘They must be very wicked men to get such harsh punishment,’ marvelled Nanny Piggins. ‘Still, it’s important to be polite. There is no greater crime than rudeness. They hosted me, so I must invite them over.’ Nanny Piggins turned and loudly addressed all the men. ‘Would you all like to come and visit us for morning tea?’

‘Yes, please!’ said all the prisoners.

‘Nanny Piggins!’ exclaimed Derrick.

‘They’re prisoners,’ pleaded Samantha.

‘You’ll promise to come back here again afterwards, won’t you?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘Of course,’ said the prisoners.

‘But the guards will notice that they’ve gone,’ argued Samantha.

‘That’s okay. We’ll leave a note letting the guards know where we are,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘They can’t complain about that.’

Derrick and Samantha suspected that the guards could indeed complain about that but there was no time to discuss it further. Nanny Piggins was already shepherding prisoners into the tunnel ahead of her and telling them to put the kettle on when they got to the house so she could make them some hot chocolate.

It took the children a while to relax about having forty convicted felons in their home, but once they did, even they had to admit that the morning-tea party was a success. When Nanny Piggins found out that they did not have sticky buns in prison (the most severe part of their punishment), she immediately set to work. In a tornado of flour, sugar, butter and jam, she soon whipped up the most gloriously delicious sticky buns ever. The prisoners enjoyed them so much it brought tears to their eyes. Mikey, the cheque forger, swore to give up crime altogether if she would give him the recipe.

After they had eaten, Boris performed a special ballet dance for them. He had not meant to, but
he was stung by a wasp (which is what can happen when you let jam get all over your fur). Boris did some of his most spectacular flying leaps and pirouettes. Then, after the applause had finished, Nanny Piggins re-enacted a story from her pirate book. It was a particularly good one that involved swinging on the curtains, then having a pretend sword fight up and down the mantelpiece. So naturally they all lost track of time. That was until Nanny Piggins looked at the clock and screamed, ‘Aaaaggggh!’

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Derrick.

‘It’s twelve o’clock! On the note I promised I’d have all the prisoners back by eleven forty-five,’ explained Nanny Piggins.

‘We’re going to be in so much trouble,’ worried Steve.

‘The guards don’t like it when we’re late for lunch,’ added Bruce (who was serving twelve months for poisoning his brother’s aspidistra).

‘Don’t worry,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘If you quickly hurry back along the tunnel, perhaps they won’t have noticed you’ve gone.’

‘Good idea,’ said Steve.

And so, all forty prisoners rushed out into the backyard and over to Nanny Piggins’ hole. But they
did not jump in. Because someone was waiting for them.

Standing at the bottom of the pit was a very angry-looking man.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘And why is he in my hole?’

‘It’s the Governor,’ whispered Steve. ‘He’s in charge of the prison.’

‘Hello,’ said Nanny Piggins, optimistically adding, ‘would you like a sticky bun?’

But the Governor just ignored her and yelled directly at the prisoners. ‘I’m personally going to see to it that all of you have your sentences tripled! Digging an escape tunnel and breaking out is unforgivable. But to do it right before lunch, when chef has been slaving all morning over a lovely casserole, is despicable. You should be ashamed of yourselves!’

The prisoners all hung their heads.

‘I wish he wouldn’t yell’ said Boris, who, being a sensitive bear, had hidden in the compost heap.

‘But it’s not their fault,’ interrupted Nanny Piggins. ‘They didn’t dig the tunnel out. I dug the tunnel in.’

The Governor turned to look at Nanny Piggins. He had never been interrupted by a pig before, let
alone one so glamorous, but he was too cross to let that affect him. ‘
You
dug the tunnel?!’ he roared. ‘You organised this mass breakout from my prison?!’

‘Yes,’ admitted Nanny Piggins truthfully.

‘Then I’m going to see to it that you go to jail for fifty years!’ exclaimed the Governor.

The Green children were horrified. Fifty years was an enormously long time to be without their nanny. And they knew there was no chance of Nanny Piggins getting out early for good behaviour. Good behaviour was not her strong point.

‘All right,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘All right?!’ exclaimed the children. Surely their nanny could not be giving up that easily.

‘If you’ll just step into the house for a moment while I powder my nose,’ said Nanny Piggins.

Now the children knew Nanny Piggins was up to something. She never talked about ‘powdering her nose’. If she was going to the toilet, she would say ‘I’m going to the toilet’. Apart from anything else, she did not have a nose, she had a snout. So they followed her into the house to see what would happen next.

‘While you’re waiting,’ suggested Nanny Piggins to the Governor, ‘have a sticky bun.’

Now these sticky buns looked particularly
good. Even a professionally miserable man like the Governor found them hard to resist. There was snowy white icing sugar on top, then thick gooey cream as well as great big globs of strawberry jam inside, so altogether it was too much for any man to resist. Especially a man who’d only had muesli for breakfast.

‘I am feeling a bit peckish,’ he admitted.

By the time Nanny Piggins returned from pretending to ‘powder her nose’, the Governor was polishing off his seventh sticky bun. There was icing sugar and jam all over his face. And a big dollop of cream on his tie.

‘These sticky buns are spectacular,’ gushed the Governor.

‘I know,’ said Nanny Piggins, because she was always truthful but rarely modest.

‘And this hot chocolate is so … so … so chocolatey,’ added the Governor.

Which made Nanny Piggins blush with pride, because really, there is no greater compliment.

‘It’s just a shame I can’t invite you over to morning tea again,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘You can’t?’ said the Governor. He looked like he was going to cry.

‘No, if I’m serving a fifty-year jail term, I doubt
I’ll find the time to make sticky buns,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘Oh,’ said the Governor.

‘And I won’t get to be in your prison,’ continued Nanny Piggins. ‘I’ll be in a women’s prison.’

‘Oh,’ said the Governor again.

Everyone in the room – all forty prisoners, Derrick, Samantha and Michael – all looked at the Governor expectantly.

‘I suppose you don’t necessarily have to go to jail,’ began the Governor.

‘I don’t?’ asked Nanny Piggins innocently.

‘Breaking into a prison isn’t nearly as bad as breaking out of one,’ continued the Governor (he could be quite reasonable when his blood sugar was high).

‘The only thing is,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘I suppose I’ll have to fill in the hole.’

‘There’s no rush to do that,’ said the Governor.

‘There isn’t?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘You might as well leave the hole there. As long as all the prisoners promise not to use it to escape.’

‘We promise,’ said the prisoners. (They did not want their sticky-bun route filled in either.)

‘Then I don’t see what harm one little tunnel causes,’ said the Governor.

‘Excellent!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘Then you can all pop in for mudcake next Thursday.’

And so Nanny Piggins was very satisfied with her time as a pirate. She had visited China and made forty-one new friends. But best of all, she had a great big hole in the garden ready to push Mr Green in next time he annoyed her.

Nanny Piggins and the children were on their hands and knees recarpeting the living room. I know this sounds like a very industrious thing to do. But I should explain that the only reason they were recarpeting the room was because they had tested to see if sulfuric acid really would burn a hole through the floor, like they had seen in a movie. And their experiment had been one hundred per cent successful.

Having completed the experiment, however, it then occurred to them that Mr Green might not be too impressed with the results. He seemed to be inordinately fond of his bland brown floor covering. He always lost his temper if anyone made a mud slippery slide over it or trod custard pie into the fibres. So having tried and failed to hide the hole with a vase of flowers (the three-hundred-year-old antique vase simply dropped through the hole and smashed in the basement), Nanny Piggins decided on recarpeting.

Fortunately, they found a piece of carpet that fit perfectly, in Miss Smith’s living room. She was an elderly spinster who lived across the road. They borrowed Miss Smith’s carpet (without asking). I know this sounds an awful lot like stealing but really it was just borrowing. Nanny Piggins was perfectly prepared to return the carpet if it ever occurred to Miss Smith to ask her whether the carpet stapled to their floor was her own.

As luck would have it, this never became an issue. When Miss Smith returned from bingo at the church hall and discovered that her living room was now carpetless, she was delighted. She thought some good Samaritan had polished her floorboards. And because Miss Smith loved ballroom dancing,
floorboards were much better as far as she was concerned.

So Nanny Piggins, Derrick, Samantha and Michael were just stapling down the last corner of Miss Smith’s bright purple rug, using Mr Green’s desk stapler, when they heard a pounding at the front door.

‘Who could that be?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘It can’t be the truancy officer,’ said Michael. He knew this for a fact because he had seen Nanny Piggins tie Miss Britches to the filing cabinet in her office earlier that morning, using nothing but the wool unravelled from her own cardigan. (The cardigan had it coming. It was a hideous pink with bunny buttons down the front.)

‘No, she could never have undone all those knots this quickly,’ agreed Nanny Piggins.

‘Perhaps it’s a door-to-door salesman,’ suggested Samantha.

‘No, they don’t come anymore,’ said Nanny Piggins sadly. ‘You bite one salesman and they all hold it against you.’

‘He brought it on himself,’ comforted Derrick. ‘He promised to make your whites whiter. He deserved to suffer the consequences.’

The pounding at the door started up again.

‘Well, there’s only one way to find out who it is,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘We’ll just have to go to the living room and peek through the window.’

‘Or we could always answer the door,’ suggested Samantha.

‘Oh yes, I suppose we could try that too,’ conceded Nanny Piggins.

And so without peeking through the window, the letterbox, the keyhole or using the spy camera attached to the roof, Nanny Piggins flung open the front door to see who was there and immediately regretted it. For there on the doorstep was an angry-looking armadillo. (Now if you do not know what an armadillo looks like, I had better describe it. Because an armadillo is the type of animal that, if no-one told you what it looked like, you would never guess. It is most peculiar. It looks like a pig going to a costume party dressed as a tank. Like a pig, an armadillo has short legs and a snout. But unlike a pig, an armadillo is covered in a leathery, hard shell.) Then the armadillo, without any introduction or explanation, immediately tried to slap Nanny Piggins across the face with a glove.

Fortunately, however, Nanny Piggins was an eighth dan black belt in Taekwondo. Her self-defence reflexes were so super fast, she could not have let an
armadillo slap her in the face even if she wanted to. She just blocked the slap. The armadillo tried to slap her again and again and again. But each time Nanny Piggins deftly blocked the blow.

‘Would you just hold still and let me slap you, for goodness sake!’ said the exasperated armadillo.

‘Why?’ asked Nanny Piggins. She could not see any good reason she should let an armadillo slap her, but she was prepared to be open-minded.

‘Because I’m trying to challenge you to a duel,’ said the armadillo.

‘You’re what?’ asked Nanny Piggins, beginning to believe that armadillos were as peculiar as they looked.

‘Oh, I understand,’ said Samantha.

‘You do?’ said Nanny Piggins, Derrick and Michael in unison, because they certainly didn’t.

‘In the olden days if you wanted to challenge someone to a duel, you slapped them in the face with a glove,’ explained Samantha.

‘Did you learn that at school?’ asked Nanny Piggins, begrudgingly beginning to feel the first dawning of respect for the education system.

‘No, I learnt it from reading lots of historical romance novels,’ admitted Samantha.

‘Then it must be true,’ decided Nanny Piggins,
because she had a lot more respect for romance writers than she did for teachers.

‘The child is correct,’ declared the armadillo. ‘My name is Eduardo Montebianco and I have travelled all the way from Mexico to challenge you to a duel.’

‘Why?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘Did you steal his true love or dishonour his family name?’ questioned Samantha. ‘That’s the reason they usually have duels in novels.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But I am very glamorous. Sometimes I have a powerful effect on people without even realising. Once the head coach of the Chinese gymnastics team saw me being fired out of a cannon and was so impressed with my athleticism and grace, she immediately went home to China and made all her gymnasts put on twenty kilos by eating doughnuts.’

‘Did it improve their performance as gymnasts?’ asked Michael.

‘No. They enjoyed the doughnuts so much they all ran away to work in doughnut shops,’ admitted Nanny Piggins. ‘But they were very happy.’

‘I’m challenging you to a duel,’ interrupted Eduardo, ‘because you claim to be the “Greatest Flying Animal in all the World”.’

‘So?’ said Nanny Piggins, perfectly confident that this was true.

‘It is a lie,’ declared Eduardo. ‘For I am the “Greatest Flying Animal in all the World”.’

Now if you are paying attention, you might, at this point, question how either a pig (Nanny Piggins) or an armadillo (Eduardo Montebianco) could possibly claim to be the ‘Greatest Flying Animal in all the World’, when there are so many animals that have wings – for instance, birds. But you have to understand, for circus folk, a flying animal that uses wings is just cheating. It would be like the bearded lady sticking a toupee to her chin, or the trapeze artists wrapping themselves in bubble wrap in case they fall, or the strong man getting a friend to help him lift things. When Nanny Piggins and Eduardo talk about the ‘Greatest Flying Animal’, they both mean the same thing – being fired out of a cannon. Which is something to boast about because being fired out of a cannon is really difficult. Whereas flapping wings is really simple, if you’ve got them. Now, back to the story.

Nanny Piggins’ eyes narrowed. ‘You?’ she said, managing to compact an enormous amount of contempt into that one short word.

‘Yes, I,’ said Eduardo. ‘For I, too, belong to a
circus. And I, too, am fired out of a cannon. And it offends me to have a mere woman, and a mere pig, claiming to be better than me.’

‘Really?’ said Nanny Piggins, as she looked over the armadillo from head to toe, trying to decide which part of him she was going to bite first.

‘Yes, really,’ said Eduardo. ‘So I challenge you to a duel, to prove once and for all that I am the Greatest Animal Aviationist Alive.’ (This is just a showing-off way of saying ‘Flying Animal’.)

‘Okay,’ said Nanny Piggins, deciding that the armadillo’s plated shell looked too difficult to bite, and that she would have to be content with punishing him another way. ‘Where and when?’

‘Tomorrow morning at dawn,’ declared Eduardo.

‘Fine,’ said Nanny Piggins, even though, in her opinion, the only decent thing to do at dawn was sleep.

‘We shall align our cannons side by side, then fire them to see who goes the furthest,’ continued the armadillo.

‘All right,’ said Nanny Piggins. It sounded simple enough to her.

‘And to make things interesting,’ added Eduardo, ‘we will fire our cannons across –’ he paused here for dramatic effect – ‘Dead Man’s Gorge!’

‘No!’ gasped all three Green children.

‘What’s Dead Man’s Gorge?’ asked Nanny Piggins. She was not sure if it was a geographical feature, or something you found in the pocket of a man who had died from eating too much.

‘Dead Man’s Gorge is two cliff faces either side of a gaping two hundred and nineteen foot drop into the sea,’ announced Eduardo as melodramatically as only a Latin American can.

‘Oh,’ said Nanny Piggins, as she mentally tried to picture what two hundred and nineteen feet looked like. A few quick sums gave her the answer – a twenty-storeyed building or, to put it in terms of food (which is how Nanny Piggins always preferred to think of maths), two hundred and nineteen foot-long hotdogs laid out end to end.

‘Do you accept my challenge, little pig?’ asked Eduardo rudely, ‘or will you simply surrender any claim you have made for the title of “World’s Greatest Flying Animal”?’

‘Let me answer you like this,’ said Nanny Piggins. And she picked up the glove, slapped Eduardo hard across the face and slammed the front door in his snout before he had time to blink. She had yet to prove that she could fly further than Eduardo, but
she certainly had much quicker reflexes than any armadillo.

So Nanny Piggins and the Green children sat with their backs to the front door, thinking (or in Samantha’s case, worrying, because that’s what she did whenever she thought).

‘What are you going to do?’ worried Samantha. She didn’t want to see her nanny plummet two hundred and nineteen feet into the sea, or worse still, plummet two hundred and nineteen feet onto the rocks next to the sea.

‘You could lay out mattresses on the rocks,’ suggested Michael.

‘You could use a parachute,’ suggested Derrick.

‘You could run away,’ suggested Samantha.

‘Hmm,’ said Nanny Piggins, as she concentrated hard. ‘Beating a flying armadillo shouldn’t be too difficult.’

‘But you can’t do it,’ said Samantha. ‘You don’t have a cannon. And your old circus is miles away. And even if it wasn’t, the Ringmaster would never lend you his cannon.’ (The children had met the Ringmaster so they knew he was a very wicked man indeed.)

‘Piffle,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Finding a cannon is the easiest thing in the world.’

‘It is?’ asked Derrick, who would not mind having access to a cannon for dealing with Barry Nicholas, the school bully.

‘Of course,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘They always have them at war museums.’

The children could not deny this because there were indeed several large cannons outside the war museum in town.

‘But they aren’t for people to use,’ said Samantha.

‘Of course they are,’ argued Nanny Piggins. ‘Why else would they leave them outside, if they didn’t want people to borrow them?’

‘Um …’ said Samantha as she tried to think of a better explanation, then realised there wasn’t one.

‘But if we take a cannon from the war museum, won’t the war veterans think that is very rude?’ asked Derrick.

‘If you had survived some bloodthirsty and horrific war, would you rather see a cannon stuck outside a museum where grubby children and tourists climb all over it, or at Dead Man’s Gorge blasting a pig further than any pig has ever been blasted before?’

The children had to assume that, like them, the veterans would want to see the flying pig. So later that day Nanny Piggins and the children caught the
bus into town and went to borrow a cannon. They took Boris with them, because if you are planning to move a gigantic cannon, it is handy to have a seven-hundred-kilogram bear with you to help with the heavy lifting.

There were several cannons to choose from outside the war museum so Nanny Piggins picked the biggest (her usual policy when choosing anything). Now you might think that security guards, the police or even just good-hearted bystanders would stop this ‘borrowing’ from taking place in broad daylight. But, as it turned out, the sight of a pig, a bear and three children taking a cannon from outside the war museum was so strange that no-one thought to challenge them.

(Now I must make one thing clear – Nanny Piggins does not encourage theft. She knows stealing is wrong. It is always, always wrong. But borrowing is okay. And as Nanny Piggins always says – if you must borrow something without asking, do it in broad daylight. It gives it a veneer of respectability.)

There was some trouble getting the cannon home. It was a World War I fifteen-inch Howitzer and weighed about six tons, so there was no way it was going to fit through the door of the bus. Plus they were not sure whether the bus driver would
give a cannon a ticket. Nanny Piggins thought they should if they allowed baby pushchairs on the bus. But the children suspected that the bus driver would see baby pushchairs and cannons as belonging to two separate categories.

Fortunately the dilemma was solved when Nanny Piggins had a brilliant idea. She got Derrick to distract the bus driver by pretending he had been bitten by a venomous snake. And while he writhed on the floor in pretend pain, Nanny Piggins took the belt off her dress and tied the cannon to the back bumper of the bus. So the cannon was dragged back to Mr Green’s house without any problem (although the bus did not get above five kilometres an hour the whole way).

Back at home, Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children considered what to do next. ‘We’ve got a cannon,’ said Derrick, ‘so is that it? Are you all ready for your duel?’

‘Not quite,’ admitted Nanny Piggins. ‘I haven’t been blasted out of a cannon for months. I’m out of shape.’

Boris patted Nanny Piggins comfortingly on the hand. ‘I didn’t like to say anything. But I’m glad you know.’