Nanny Piggins and the Daring Rescue 7 (16 page)

‘It's an assignment, not a competition,' Derrick reminded her.

‘You say potato, I say potato,' said Nanny Piggins.

‘Vhere is this egg ve must spin?' asked Alexandra, proving not only did she look strange, she sounded strange too, for she had a thick Lithuanian accent.

‘Here,' said Michael, lifting his egg from the dresser and tentatively holding it out to Alexandra.

‘Aggg,' said Alexandra (which is Lithuanian for ‘Ahhh'). ‘This egg, she has potential!'

‘Wonderful!' declared Nanny Piggins. ‘Michael, I've already rung the school and told them you won't be going in for the rest of the week because you've contracted dengue fever, which means you can stay home all day and work with Alexandra.'

‘But –' began Michael.

‘No need to thank me,' Nanny Piggins assured him. ‘What's the point of having circus connections if you don't use them?'

Nanny Piggins turned to Samantha. ‘Now this minding an egg thing, do you need any help with that?'

‘No, not at all, I've completely got it covered,' said Samantha, clutching her now bubble-wrapped cracked egg to her chest for fear that Nanny Piggins would whisk her off and introduce her to some sort of egg-protection guru.

‘Good,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘That leaves me free to work with you, Derrick.'

‘Oh,' said Derrick. Nanny Piggins could be daunting when she was feeling enthusiastic. ‘I've actually had some ideas myself.'

‘You have?' said Nanny Piggins, impressed. ‘What are they?'

‘Well, um . . .' began Derrick, embarrassed to reveal the truth. ‘I was thinking I could wrap the egg in a protective layer of cake,' he finally admitted. (Living with Nanny Piggins for so long had caused some of her thought processes to rub off on him.)

‘What a brilliant idea!' declared Nanny Piggins. ‘We'll definitely do that. I've got a sponge cake recipe that will be perfect. But think of all the other things you could try – parachutes, airbags, compressed gases, airfoil technology . . . We're going to have so much fun experimenting all week.'

‘But what about school?' asked Derrick.

‘There's no time for that!' exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘I rang them and said you had Ross River fever.'

‘Won't they find that hard to believe when Michael has dengue fever?' asked Derrick.

‘Well, they'd think it a strange coincidence if you had the
same
type of fever,' said Nanny Piggins.

‘What about me?' asked Samantha.

‘I told them you had malaria,' said Nanny Piggins.

‘So I could stay home too?' she asked.

‘No, no, no, you have to go to school,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘To stay home would be cheating. You have to protect your egg while living your normal day-to-day life.'

‘But you normally keep us out of school all the time,' argued Samantha.

‘I know,' agreed Nanny Piggins, ‘but it would be against the spirit of the competition.'

‘Assignment,' Derrick reminded her.

‘Yes, yes, same difference,' said Nanny Piggins breezily. ‘Now, let's all go downstairs and eat chocolate-covered waffles. We will need our energy for a full day of learning.'

After packing Samantha off to school and Michael off with Alexandra, Nanny Piggins and Derrick got started on his project.

‘First of all, I want you to know I am not going to do this project for you,' Nanny Piggins announced.

‘You're not?' asked Derrick.

‘I don't want to be one of those dreadful child-carers who does all their children's assignments,' said Nanny Piggins.

‘You're talking about Nanny Anne, aren't you?' said Derrick.

‘Yes, I am,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘There is no way that Samson Wallace made the bonnet he wore to the Easter parade – it clearly required advanced post-graduate millinery skills. And only Nanny Anne would have the gall to stuff a real baby chicken in a cage and staple it to a child's head.'

‘So how are we going to proceed?' asked Derrick.

‘Clearly we should go to the shop and buy several hundred eggs, then go up on the roof and throw them off,' said Nanny Piggins.

‘While wrapping the eggs in different protective layers each time to see what works best?' asked Derrick.

‘Yes, I suppose we could jump straight to that,' agreed Nanny Piggins.

And so Nanny Piggins, Derrick and Boris had a lovely afternoon up on the roof with several crates of eggs, bubble wrap, balloons, cardboard and a parachute they had borrowed from the old retired army colonel who lived round the corner (and was in love with Nanny Piggins). They managed to break every single egg they hurled off the roof but they had a tremendous time doing it.

By the end of the day they had learnt quite a lot: blancmange does not just taste delicious, it makes an excellent improvised cushioning device; it's hard to sticky-tape a parachute to an egg; and throwing eggs onto a concrete surface is always fun no matter how many times you do it.

Samantha had a comparatively dull time going to school on her own, but she did not notice because she was taking her own assignment very seriously. And she knew that if you want to protect an egg, spending time with a circus pig on a roof was not a good idea. It would have been too easy for her own dear Eggbert to get mixed up with the other eggs and end up a spattered mess on the driveway below.

Not that Samantha had an easy time of it. All week Nanny Anne kept finding excuses to drop by the school and bump into Samantha (sometimes so hard she was knocked to the ground) in her petty mission to smash Samantha's egg. (Nanny Anne had kept Margaret Wallace home from school to protect her egg. And unlike Nanny Piggins, Nanny Anne did not ring up and say Margaret had malaria, she actually made sure Margaret got malaria. Which shows her commitment to Egg Week because she had a devil of a job getting a diseased mosquito shipped to herself via eBay.)

All three Green children were relieved when Thursday evening rolled round. Michael was exhausted from his daily ten-hour spinning lessons with Alexandra, Derrick was windswept and sun-tanned from all the time he had spent up on the roof and Samantha was emotionally exhausted from taking care of Eggbert.

Before they went to bed, Nanny Piggins gave the children a pep talk. ‘Just remember, children, tomorrow may be Egg Day but it is also just an ordinary day. These sorts of school events, which inevitably devolve into bitter competitiveness, are always very silly. So I don't want you to take it to heart if you lose. I will always love you no matter what happens to your egg tomorrow. And win or lose, we will be having chocolate cream pie for dinner tomorrow night.'

‘So no pressure then?' said Derrick.

‘None at all,' agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘Although, if you could win and in doing so humiliate Nanny Anne for me, I would be very grateful.'

Nanny Piggins, Michael and Derrick were awoken the next morning by screaming. Samantha was not awoken by the screaming because she was the one doing the screaming.

‘Aaa-aaaa-aaaaggggh!' screamed Samantha.

‘What is it? What's wrong?' asked Nanny Piggins as she and the boys burst into the room.

‘It's Eggbert!' Samantha exclaimed. ‘He's gone! He was right here on my dresser and now he's gone.'

‘Don't worry,' said Derrick. ‘We'll help you look.'

‘He can't have gone far,' said Michael. ‘Maybe there was an earthquake in the night and he rolled off the dresser.'

Michael got down on his hands and knees and started to look.

‘Um . . .' said Nanny Piggins, ‘there really isn't any need to look. I know where Eggbert is.'

The children looked at their nanny. For a pig, it was unusual to see her looking so sheepish.

Samantha began to suspect a dreadful possibility. ‘Oh no, Nanny Piggins, you didn't?'

Nanny Piggins actually blushed from shame. ‘Well, Derrick and I had been so thorough in our experiments that we had run out of eggs. And when I woke up in the night and felt a little peckish for cake, there were only three eggs left in the refrigerator. And everyone knows you need four eggs for a really good sponge.'

‘You cooked and ate Eggbert?' wailed Samantha.

‘Not at all,' said Nanny Piggins. ‘I cooked and partially ate Eggbert. I saved you a slice.'

‘But what's my teacher going to say?' despaired Samantha. ‘I'm going to get an “F”.'

‘Oh pish!' said Nanny Piggins. ‘I'm sure your teacher wouldn't be so petty. It's a very delicious sponge, and there is quite a large chunk left. If you give your teacher a slice, as soon as she tastes it she'll understand. She'll know Eggbert had to be sacrificed for a higher cause.'

At this point Samantha wept a little bit, which made Nanny Piggins feel dreadful – until she persuaded Samantha to eat some of the cake, then Samantha immediately agreed that Nanny Piggins had done entirely the right thing, before scoffing down some more.

When they arrived at Egg Day, Nanny Piggins was impressed. All the classes had been cancelled (an excellent start in her opinion) and the whole school had been decorated with egg banners and egg cardboard cut-outs. (You see, unlike every other public holiday, Egg Day was a non-religious celebration so the school could really get behind it without offending anybody.)

The first event of the day would be the spinning. Everyone in Michael's class would get a turn to go out in front of the entire school and spin their egg. All the kids did really well. Unlike maths homework, egg spinning was an assignment they all enjoyed and they had practised hard all week. So they all managed at least 60 seconds of spinning.

The clear leader was, however, Margaret Wallace. While the other students had practised all week, she had been practising for two years. Nanny Anne had her on such a comprehensive training regimen that the muscles in Margaret Wallace's spinning wrist were enormous. Her right wrist was twice the thickness of her left.

When it came time for her to spin, you could see the tension on Margaret's face. Nanny Piggins felt like leaping out of the crowd, hugging the poor child and assuring her she did not have to spin it if she didn't want to. She looked across at Nanny Anne. You could tell she really wanted to push poor Margaret out of the way and spin the egg herself.

Margaret took a deep breath, put her egg down on the stage and spun with all her might. And it was a truly impressive spin. Her egg rotated and rotated seemingly endlessly. It eventually came to a halt after 17 minutes. Nanny Anne was already on the phone to the Guinness Book of World Records claiming the title for the longest egg spin by an under eight-year-old.

There was only one person left to spin – Michael. He was going last because he had accidentally become stuck in a toilet cubicle while putting on his purple sequinned costume. What Michael did not realise (because he was stuck in a toilet cubicle at the time) was that none of the other students had dressed up in costumes and that all the other students had spun their eggs on the wooden floorboards of the stage.

Being a circus pig, it had never occurred to Nanny Piggins to do something as mundane as spinning an egg on the floor. It never occurred to Alexandra either. And Michael, being a biddable boy, had gone along with everything they suggested. So after Boris finally liberated Michael from the toilet cubicle (by ripping the door off its hinges) and he marched out on stage in a purple skin-tight jumpsuit, the whole crowd gasped.

‘Doesn't he look marvellous,' said Nanny Piggins, her heart swelling with pride.

‘Sequins really suit him,' agreed Alexandra.

Unfortunately what Nanny Piggins did not realise, because she had never been a little boy, was that little boys do not actually like to look marvellous. They like to look exactly the same as all the other little boys so that they do not stand out and no-one makes fun of them.

‘Perhaps you'd better spin your egg, Michael,' called Michael's teacher from the front row of the audience.