Nanny Piggins and the Accidental Blast-off (3 page)

Since she had become the Green’s nanny, Nanny Piggins had rung up the school saying that the children had smallpox, bigpox, cowpox, Mad Cow’s Disease, Bubonic Plague, ESP, athlete’s foot, athlete’s leg, athlete’s dishpan hands, malaria, diphtheria, foot and mouth disease, rickets and temporary blindness due to low blood chocolate levels. So as you can imagine, the secretary was disappointed to hear that the children had contracted something
as mundane as a cold. ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll make a note of it.’

Nanny Piggins had barely placed the telephone back in its cradle before it rang. She picked it up.

‘Hello,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘I have just been informed of your intentions to blatantly disregard my directive,’ barked Mr Bernard.

‘If you mean that the children have colds, then yes, they have colds,’ said Nanny Piggins. She did not really want to have a protracted conversation with Mr Bernard. The children were running fevers, so she wanted to get back upstairs and tend to them with some cooling chocolate ice-cream.

‘You’re lying!’ accused Mr Bernard.

Nanny Piggins gasped. This was no way to speak to a lady. ‘Would you like me to get a doctor to come and confirm my diagnosis?’ she asked.

‘Ha!’ said Mr Bernard. ‘I have no trouble believing that you have some doctor in your pocket ready to back up your duplicitous schemes.’ (As it happens Nanny Piggins did have a doctor friend who would do almost anything for her, ever since she had agreed to stop ruining his practice with her holistic cake-healing business.) ‘No, I don’t believe it for a moment,’ continued Mr Bernard. ‘I am
coming to collect the children. I will be there in thirty minutes.’ With which he slammed down the telephone.

‘Well I never,’ said Nanny Piggins to herself. She was at a loss. That was the problem with arguing with someone over the telephone, she could not end the conversation the way she wanted to because you could not bite someone’s leg via a phone line.

‘Is everything all right, Nanny Piggins?’ asked Samantha. She had struggled out of bed and come to investigate when she heard the phone ring. Nanny Piggins looked up at her. Samantha was white and sweaty and she had her worried face on. There was no way Nanny Piggins was going to let some big bullying truancy officer manhandle this poor sick girl.

‘Everything is absolutely fine,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Mr Bernard will be popping down for a quick chat. But that won’t be a problem at all. I’m going to get Boris to come and sit with you and tell you Russian folktales while I pop out to get a few things. We must make our visitor welcome.’

So while Boris took care of the children, Nanny Piggins went out to fetch supplies. But she did not go to the bakery to buy a cake as she normally would for a visitor. Nanny Piggins deemed Mr Bernard to
be unworthy of bakery cake. Instead, she went to the building site at the end of the block and asked the builders if she could borrow their bulldozer. Naturally they agreed – they all loved Nanny Piggins because she made them flapjacks and put on trapeze shows by swinging from their demolition ball.

When Mr Bernard arrived, precisely thirty minutes after he had issued his threat, he was astonished to discover that the Green’s ordinary suburban house was surrounded by a two-and-a-half-metre-wide moat on all four sides. And Nanny Piggins was leaning out the living-room window as she finished filling up the moat with water from a garden hose. When Nanny Piggins saw Mr Bernard she called out to him, ‘Hello, Mr Bernard, sorry you can’t see the children, they’re infectious.’ Then she slammed the window shut.

Mr Bernard was bewildered. But he had never let a little thing like emotions slow him down in wartime and he was determined to apply the same principals here.

Mr Bernard went to knock on the front door, then realised he could not. For a start, to do so he would have to cross the moat. And secondly, the front door had been entirely covered up by a raised drawbridge (which Nanny Piggins had made
herself using the heavy 200-year-old door from the town hall. Technically she had not asked permission before she borrowed it, but none of the public servants going in or out of the building had had the courage to stop her).

For the first time, the thought crossed Mr Bernard’s mind that perhaps he had underestimated this pig. Mr Bernard had heard that Nanny Piggins was tricky, yet he had not expected her to construct a medieval fortress in under thirty minutes. But he soon dismissed this idea as irrelevant. He had chased arms’ smugglers through the jungles of Sri Lanka, tracked rebels through snowstorms in Afghanistan and been the army’s hand-to-hand combat champion three times in a row. He was sure he could handle one petite pig.

Mr Bernard turned his attention to the moat. ‘It’s going to take more than a puddle to stop me!’ he yelled at the house.

‘Sorry, I can’t hear you, I’m too busy looking after sick children,’ lied Nanny Piggins (her ears were perfectly capable of multi-tasking).

Nanny Piggins, Boris and the sick children were really all peering through the upstairs window. They did not want to miss what would happen next.

Mr Bernard put his foot forward and stepped
into the moat. This was his first mistake. He had assumed, given the little time she’d had, that Nanny Piggins would have dug a shallow moat that he could wade across. But Nanny Piggins did not do things by half measures. Indeed, there was no need to do so when you had borrowed a giant bulldozer. The moat she had dug was three metres deep, as Mr Bernard discovered when he plunged into the icy cold water all the way up to his buzz cut.

‘Agh!’ he cried involuntarily. Because even battle-hardened soldiers hate being plunged into cold water. He then struggled to scramble out, which was a lot harder than he expected because Nanny Piggins had made the lawn extra specially slippery by smearing gallons and gallons of raspberry jelly on it (while she had decided not to dangle Mr Bernard over a swimming pool full of raspberry jelly, she had prepared the jelly just in case).

So by the time Mr Bernard scrambled up on the grass, he was soaking wet, sticky with jelly and panting to catch his breath. He scanned the house, deciding where he was going to attempt to infiltrate next.

Nanny Piggins pushed open the upstairs window and called down to him, ‘Would you like a towel?’

Mr Bernard shook his fist at her. ‘I’m coming to take those children to school!’

‘It really would be better if you gave up now,’ urged Nanny Piggins. ‘I’d hate to see you injure yourself.’

Mr Bernard did not respond. Instead he went to his van to fetch some equipment.

When he first got this job he had visited the former truancy officer in the recuperation home and she had advised him on the hardware he would need. At the time he had thought that the extensive list of tradesman’s tools she recommended was a product of her traumatised mind, but now he realised that it was excellent advice from a sensible woman. Thankfully he had listened to her, so Mr Bernard had just what he needed on hand. He slid a military surplus inflatable dinghy out of his van, along with a set of bolt cutters and an angle grinder.

Mr Bernard pulled the ripcord on the dinghy so that it inflated immediately and he set it on the moat water. Then he picked up his angle grinder and bolt cutters and started paddling towards the drawbridge. He was just standing up in the dingy (never a particularly stable thing to do) and reaching up to the chains that held the drawbridge in place, about to cut them off with his angle grinder, when suddenly he was hit in the head by a barrage of rock cakes.

Now, naturally, you will be horrified. It is so uncharacteristic of Nanny Piggins to waste her own delicious rock cakes on assaulting something as unworthy as a truancy officer’s head. But rest assured, they were not her own rock cakes. Nanny Piggins’ rock cakes were light, fluffy and delicious and, therefore, totally unsuitable for attacking would-be home intruders. So Nanny Piggins had nipped down to Nanny Anne’s house and borrowed four dozen of her rock cakes, which were full of pureed beetroot and grated carrot, and therefore as hard as actual rocks (and much less tasty).

As a result, Mr Bernard started to wobble and nothing is more wobbly than a big man in a small dinghy. He was soon toppling back into the freezing water and dropping his angle grinder to the murky depths, never to be seen again.

It is at this point that the Police Sergeant arrived, as Mr Bernard splashed about in the moat hurling abuse at Nanny Piggins, and as Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children leaned out of the window, smiling. Even the children were starting to look better. It is amazing the recuperative effect of seeing a big bully make a fool of himself.

‘What have we here?’ asked the Police Sergeant, standing over Mr Bernard in the moat.

‘Arrest that pig!’ demanded Mr Bernard. ‘She is wilfully keeping those children out of school. And she has assaulted me repeatedly.’

‘Really? We have had several complaints from the neighbours,’ said the Police Sergeant, taking out his notebook.

‘Did you hear that, Piggins, you’re in for it now,’ called Mr Bernard.

‘The complaints have not been about Nanny Piggins,’ corrected the Police Sergeant. ‘I think you’ll find that on this street she is a respected member of the community.’ Which was true.

While Nanny Piggins did sometimes steal mail, break into other peoples’ houses in search of cake ingredients and leap into other peoples’ gardens as part of her inexplicably dramatic children’s games, she also made sure there were absolutely no burglaries on the street, no loitering teenagers, and no door-to-door salesmen (her reputation for leg biting was so widespread). She baked everyone on the street a cake for their birthdays, anniversaries, christenings, weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs (on the condition they shared several pieces with her). And while the neighbours rolled their eyes and despaired of her behaviour at times, she was also beloved. So when the people in the street looked out their windows
and saw a great big man yelling at Nanny Piggins and trying to break into her house, they naturally called the police.

‘What?’ blustered Mr Bernard. Having been an army drill sergeant for twenty-five years, he was unused to situations that did not involve him being the bully and everyone else having to put up with it.

‘We have had several reports of a large angry-looking man with an unfortunate haircut yelling threats at this diminutive pig and the three children in her care,’ read the Police Sergeant from his notes. ‘Also that you have used power tools in your attempts to break into her home.’

‘But I’m the truancy officer,’ spluttered Mr Bernard.

‘That does not give you the right to trespass or vandalise private property,’ chided the Police Sergeant.

‘She started it,’ whined Mr Bernard. Like all bullies, he fell apart when someone who was not bobbing about in a moat stood over him and told him off.

‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to arrest you for being a public nuisance,’ said the Police Sergeant.

‘We are going to be in so much trouble on Monday,’ said Derrick, as he watched the truancy officer get dragged away by the police.

‘Oh I don’t think you’ll ever see him again,’ said Nanny Piggins.

‘Really, why not?’ asked Samantha.

‘Well, after he’s dried off and washed the jelly out of his clothes, I suspect he will look back on this whole incident and decide he’s much better off going back to the military,’ predicted Nanny Piggins.

And she was entirely right. By the end of the day the truancy officer could not wait to get back to the army, because he felt much safer in a war zone than in Nanny Piggins’ front yard.

The next day Headmaster Pimplestock summoned Nanny Piggins back to his office. ‘You do realise that by driving off Mr Bernard I will have to re-hire Miss Britches,’ complained Headmaster Pimplestock.

‘I think it’s for the best,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘True, she did follow us and peer in our windows at the most inconvenient times. But on the whole we got along with her very well.’

‘She never caught you. Not once,’ said the headmaster.

‘Exactly,’ agreed Nanny Piggins.

‘Yeeeeeehiyyaaaahhh!’ bellowed Nanny Piggins as she fired a rubber dart at a clump of bushes.

‘Take that!’ screamed Michael, flinging a water bomb at the same hapless plants.

‘And that!’ yelled Samantha, letting fly with Samson Wallace’s salad sandwich.

‘Hold the defensive position!’ ordered Nanny Piggins. ‘Don’t let them surround us! Victory will soon be ours!’

Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were having a lovely time at the park fighting for the land rights of Native Americans. They did this every Saturday morning. It had started out as a game of cowboys and Indians, but then Nanny Piggins read up on the history of early American settlement and nobody wanted to be cowboys anymore. The Indians were much more fun. They wore striking costumes that involved face paint and feathers, and they had vengeance on their side (Nanny Piggins loved fighting for vengeance).

So every weekend they would gather with the other neighbourhood children, then lay siege to the playground equipment and fight off the cowboys. It worked out to be a surprisingly pacifistic game, because all the enemies were imaginary, so there were very few injuries, unless you counted the plants. (The grass had been scalped so many times it no longer needed mowing.)

On this particular morning their mission was to protect The Lost Treasure of Brown Gold (a large supply of chocolate Nanny Piggins had brought along for their mid-morning snack) from the rampaging attack of General Cowardy Custard (who was, for the purposes of the exercise, being played by a particularly savage-looking begonia bush).

As such, they were so engrossed in their military planning that they did not notice when three black SUVs pulled up and a team of men in grey suits got out. If Nanny Piggins
had
noticed them she certainly would have found them intriguing, because they seemed to be talking to each other via their sleeve cuffs, usually something only super-spies in movies did.

When one of the men stepped forward and yelled into a bullhorn, ‘Sarah Matahari Lorelai Piggins, come out and give yourself up!’ Nanny Piggins assumed it was just one of the parents getting involved in the fun. So naturally she threw a bucket of dirt at him and said, ‘If you take one step nearer I’ll scalp you!’

The men were not sure what to do. They had been trained to take threats of terrorism seriously, but it was hard to take them seriously when they came from a petite pig wearing a lovely pink dress and matching bolero jacket. However, like Nanny Piggins, they enjoyed a little bit of violence, so on balance they decided to charge the play equipment, much to the delight of the children who had a wonderful time keeping them at bay by throwing water balloons and fending them off with sticks. (Nanny Piggins had taught the children the ancient
art of Kendo only the previous weekend, so they were all very handy with a stick.)

After half an hour of struggle the men eventually retreated to the safety of the park’s gazebo, to treat their wounds and revise their strategy. This gave Nanny Piggins and the children a wonderful opportunity to hide The Lost Treasure of Brown Gold – in their stomachs.

The men in the gazebo had a long and animated discussion (with much finger pointing and some weeping), then one of them went back to his SUV, opened the door and pulled out a timid-looking man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a white lab coat. The suited man handed him the bullhorn and marched him over to the play equipment.

‘Er, um, Sarah Piggins?’ said the timid man into the bullhorn.

‘Are you ready to surrender?’ demanded Nanny Piggins.

‘No, um, I think there’s been a little misunderstanding,’ said the timid man. ‘We’re not here to play.’

‘Well then, you’re a fool,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘because we’re having a jolly good game.’

‘It’s me, Peter, from the circus,’ said the timid man.

‘Peter?’ said Nanny Piggins, whipping out her binoculars for a closer look. ‘My cannon assistant! How wonderful to see you. Who do you fire out of cannons these days?’

‘I don’t do that anymore,’ admitted Peter. ‘I got a proper job.’

‘Oh no!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘What a shame! You had such a talent for gunpowder.’

‘I got a job at NASA,’ explained Peter.

‘The Naughty Association for Sneaky Acrobats?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘No,’ said Peter.

‘Good,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You don’t want to fall in with them. They never pick up their share of a restaurant bill.’

‘I work on the space program,’ continued Peter. ‘I help launch the space shuttle. At least I would if I could. For some reason we can’t get it to take-off. We’ve tried everything – recalibrating the computers, dismantling the engines, rewiring the electrical system …’

‘Did you try kicking it and pressing the “go” button lots of times?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

‘Yes, that too,’ said Peter. ‘The greatest aeronautical engineers in the world have been working on it, but with no luck. That’s why I’m here. I told my
boss, “No-one knows more about being blasted than Sarah Piggins, the world’s greatest flying pig.”’

‘It’s true,’ agreed Nanny Piggins.

‘We’re supposed to be launching the space shuttle this Saturday,’ explained Peter, ‘but we’re going to look pretty silly, with the whole world’s media watching, if we can’t even turn the engines on.’

‘So you want me to come and put on a tap dancing show to distract them?’ guessed Nanny Piggins.

‘No,’ said Peter. ‘We were wondering if you could help us fix the space shuttle?’

‘Of course! Why didn’t you say so?’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I’ll just have to pop home and pack some cake.’

‘No need,’ said Peter. ‘When I knew we were going to try to recruit you, I took the liberty of hiring a team of pastry chefs to be on stand-by at all times.’

‘This is why you were such a great assistant,’ praised Nanny Piggins.

And so Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were flown out to Houston to see if they could rescue the
space program. But when they arrived at NASA they were not given the welcome they’d been expecting.

‘When you said you knew a flying pig who might be able to help,’ yelled the head of NASA, ‘I thought you were talking metaphorically!’

‘Oh no,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘When they say I am a flying pig, they mean I am a flying pig. I won’t stand for false advertising.’

‘We can’t let a pig into the space shuttle!’ raged the head of NASA. ‘It is a scientifically controlled environment.’

‘It’s all right, I am prepared for the worst,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I know astronauts have terrible body odour. But I have a strong will, so I will tolerate it.’

‘What choice do we have, sir?’ reasoned Peter. ‘Nobody else has been able to fix the problem.’

The head of NASA considered this. They had tried everything short of turning to circus animals, and he was desperate. ‘All right, but let’s assemble a topnotch team of experts to work with her, so they can watch her like a hawk.’

‘No need,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I’ve brought my own team.’

‘Where?’ asked the head of NASA, trying to look around Boris and the children to see if there were any top scientists behind them that he had not noticed.

‘Derrick is in charge of supplies,’ explained Nanny Piggins (which, to her mind, meant cake), ‘Samantha is in charge of taking down notes,’ continued Nanny Piggins (which, to her mind, meant taking down orders for cake), ‘and Michael is second-in-command for both supplies and taking down notes – he’s very versatile.’

‘And I suppose next you’ll be telling me your bear is of vital scientific importance,’ said the head of NASA sarcastically.

‘Oh yes, he is the morale officer,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘If we can’t work out your problem right away, he will be in charge of cheering us all up by doing a little ballet.’

‘This is ridiculous – I am not letting a pig, three children and a dancing bear get into the space shuttle – it is a multi-billion dollar piece of space exploration technology.’

‘If you don’t let me fix it for you,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘it’s a multi-billion dollar paperweight.’

‘She’s right, sir,’ agreed Peter. ‘What have you got to lose?’

‘My dignity, my respected place in the scientific community, my position as head of NASA,’ said the head of NASA.

‘Pish!’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Who cares about
silly things like that? Now, has anyone got a crowbar and a wrench they can lend me so I can sort this problem out? I’d like to get on with it so I can get home in time to see
The Young and the Irritable
.’

And so the head of NASA went to sulk in his office, while Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were led away to the space shuttle. They had to put on orange jumpsuits before they were allowed inside, which delighted Nanny Piggins.

‘What a brilliant idea to wear a jumpsuit over your clothes,’ she enthused. ‘Now if any of my chocolate falls out of my pockets, it will gather around the elasticated ankles and not be lost.’

Nanny Piggins was not permitted to take a crowbar or wrench onboard. The technicians insisted that the equipment was too delicate. Instead they gave her a tiny allen key, a tiny screwdriver and a tiny flash-light. Then she was given strict instructions not to use any of them without writing a full report both before and after, detailing exactly what she had done.

As they drove across the runway towards the space shuttle, they could see it was much bigger than it looked on television, and much more peculiar
looking. It was kind of like a squat stubby aeroplane that someone had accidentally parked pointing directly upwards at the sky.

When they arrived at the launch site, Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children rode a lift up to the nose of the shuttle.

‘Are you sure this is safe?’ worried Samantha.

‘It’s fine,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘We catch lifts all the time in department stores.’

‘Not the lift,’ said Samantha, ‘I mean the space shuttle.’

‘I’d worry more about the lift,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But then I have always had a dread fear of being caught in a confined space with insufficient cake supplies.’

‘We forgot to leave a note for Father saying we wouldn’t be home for dinner,’ said Michael.

‘What is he going to think if we are in a terrible space shuttle accident?’ panicked Samantha.

‘That he will have to get his own dinner, I suppose,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘which, no doubt, he’ll find upsetting. But I’m sure he’ll struggle through.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Boris, giving the children a reassuring hug. ‘Nanny Piggins knows what she’s doing.’

‘But she doesn’t know anything about computers, space shuttles or space travel,’ said Derrick.

‘Yes, but if anyone can pick it up in five minutes, Nanny Piggins can,’ said Boris confidently.

‘Difficult things are almost never as difficult as they seem,’ explained Nanny Piggins, ‘except for sudoku. They’re impossible.’

Entering the cabin was tricky, because the space shuttle was pointing up and all the chairs were lying back. So getting about inside was more like climbing around a jungle gym than walking about inside an aeroplane.

The hardest thing was getting Boris in through the doorway. Apparently the space shuttle door had not been designed with a 700 kilogram bear in mind. Fortunately Boris happened to have a seven litre bucket of honey with him, which they were able to smear around the doorframe as lubricant. So, eventually, with the children and Nanny Piggins pulling on the inside, and the NASA ground crew pushing from the outside, he was able to get inside with one big ‘POP’.

‘What do we do first?’ asked Derrick.

‘Let’s see,’ said Nanny Piggins thoughtfully. She looked about. Then she sniffed about. Then she licked her trotter and held it in the air. The children were completely silent while she concentrated.

‘There!’ declared Nanny Piggins, pointing dramatically at one small panel in the wall. ‘There is something wrong with the wiring behind that panel.’

‘There is?’ said Derrick, astounded.

Nanny Piggins clambered across the shuttle and used her allen key to access the panel (without writing a full report beforehand).

‘Aha, just as I suspected,’ announced Nanny Piggins. ‘These two wires are crossed!’

‘How do you know?’ asked Samantha in amazement.