Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion (6 page)

'What?' said Nanny Piggins.

'I shall ensure that all my friends and colleagues, all the people who share my attitudes and values, will visit here,' explained the critic.

It took Nanny Piggins exactly two minutes and seven seconds to throw the critic out (she dragged him to the front door by his ear and pushed him down the front steps), politely ask the remaining dentists to leave, return the parachutes to the retired colonel around the corner and close down her B&B forever.

'That was a near miss,' said Nanny Piggins as she, Boris and the children sat around the kitchen table eating chocolate to recover from their ordeal. 'Money is lovely. And the chocolate you can buy with money is even lovelier. But it is not worth sacrificing your principles. And I make it a point of principle never to let anyone even more unbearable than your father stay in this house.'

The children would have voiced their agreement if their mouths had not been so very full of Nanny Piggins' Special Breakfast Chocolate.

'How was school today?' asked Nanny Piggins as Derrick, Samantha and Michael got off their bus.

'Excellent!' exclaimed Michael. 'Suzanne Foo brought in a big black spider and it ran up the librarian's leg.'

'Really? She must have trained it well,' approved Nanny Piggins.

'And sport was cancelled because it rained!' said Samantha delightedly.

'What luck!' agreed Nanny Piggins. 'What about you, Derrick? Did you have a good day?'

'All right I suppose,' said Derrick, 'except Mr Sriskandaraja caught me gaffer taping Barry Nicholas' leg to a table. Now as punishment I've got to write a one-thousand word essay on the great Italian explorer Marco Polo.'

'But that's wonderful news!' exclaimed Nanny Piggins.

'It is?' asked Derrick.

'Of course. Although it does mean you'll all have to take tomorrow off school,' Nanny Piggins added.

'It does?' asked all three Green children.

'Absolutely, because Derrick will need to do research,' explained Nanny Piggins. 'And if he is going to research Marco Polo, he should obviously start by going down to the public swimming pool and playing the game Marco Polo. Because, as I'm sure all scholars would agree, while discovering China and introducing pasta to Europe was important, the invention of the game "Marco Polo" was by far his greatest achievement.'

And so the next day, Nanny Piggins left a message on Headmaster Pimplestock's answering machine explaining that Derrick, Samantha and Michael could not go to school because the World Health Organization had asked them to find a cure for hiccups. (Even though, really, Nanny Piggins already knew the cure – eat chocolate.) Then they all went to the pool.

Now being blindfolded and chasing your friends while you scream 'Marco!' and they scream 'Polo!' is a lovely way to enjoy a backyard pool. But it is ten times more fun in a fifty-metre, eight-lane public pool. Especially once Nanny Piggins had persuaded all the people swimming up and down in the lanes to stop what they were doing and join the game. (It did not take much persuading – people swimming up and down in lanes are never having a wonderful time.)

Pretty soon there were forty-one adults of varying ages, as well as a pig (Nanny Piggins), a ten-foot-tall bear (Boris) and the three Green children playing the best and most raucous game of Marco Polo ever. The lifeguard tried to put a stop to it, even though they were not breaking any rules, because lifeguards instinctively feel they have to put a stop to anything noisy or fun. But Nanny Piggins offered him a slice of cake (a bit damp from falling in the pool), complimented him on his whistle and flirted with him generally until the lifeguard was so charmed he was soon begging to be Marco in the next round.

Four hours later, after they were finally thrown out of the pool (when the manager came out of his office and burst into tears upon seeing a giant bear demonstrating water aerobics), Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were feeling very exhilarated as they walked home eating ice-creams. That was until the most dreadful and unexpected thing happened.

They bumped in to Mr Green, literally.

One moment they were all walking along watching a particularly exciting helicopter fly overhead, and the next moment they heard a 'thump', then a 'thud', then an 'oomph'. And when they looked down they saw Mr Green sprawled on the footpath having walked straight into, and bounced straight off, Boris. Boris immediately hid behind a telegraph pole so he could remain incognito. But Nanny Piggins and the children peered down at Mr Green, wondering what he was doing walking along a street in broad daylight.

He normally went to the office before sun-up and came home very late at night. (In fact, his avoidance of daylight was so complete that Nanny Piggins had been convinced he was a vampire for the first three months she had known him. The only thing that finally persuaded her that Mr Green was not a vampire was that he was too boring to be a blood-sucking creature of the night.)

'What are you doing here?' demanded Nanny Piggins.

'I might ask the same of you,' said Mr Green, picking himself up, dusting himself off and checking over his shoulder to make sure nobody could see him talking to a pig. 'Shouldn't the children be in school?'

'They were given the day off school because all the teachers had toothache,' fabricated Nanny Piggins.

'Really?' asked Mr Green.

'Oh yes, teachers are forever secretly gobbling lollies under their desks. That is why they have such terrible tempers – too much sugar in their diet,' said Nanny Piggins. She did not believe for a moment that it was possible for anyone to have too much sugar in their diet, but she rightly guessed that Mr Green would not be listening to her.

'I'll be on my way then,' said Mr Green.

'Where?' asked Nanny Piggins, as she stepped in front of Mr Green to block his path.

'It's none of your business where I'm going,' said Mr Green gruffly, which really was a very silly thing to say, because nothing makes a person more intrigued than being told that something is not their business.

'You really shouldn't have said that,' sighed Samantha, as she noted a gleam appear in her nanny's eye.

'Just tell Nanny Piggins what you're doing, Father,' suggested Michael. 'You know it will be a lot easier in the long run.'

But whatever Mr Green was up to was clearly embarrassing because his face went red, he looked furtively over his shoulder, then he blustered, 'If you'll be so good . . . just go home . . . that is an order.' And with this he flipped up his collar to hide his face and scurried away.

'What do you think he's up to?' asked Derrick.

'Perhaps he's fallen in with criminals,' suggested Michael hopefully.

'Or he's been sacked from his job for being boring,' suggested Samantha realistically.

'Or he's rushing down to the pool having heard that there was a really excellent game of Marco Polo going on there,' suggested Boris.

'Or all three! He's probably been sacked for falling in with criminals who want to play Marco Polo,' said Nanny Piggins as she watched Mr Green scurry away in the distance. 'We should follow him just to find out for sure.'

'Wouldn't that be an invasion of Father's privacy?' asked Derrick.

'Oh yes,' said Nanny Piggins, 'but fathers shouldn't have privacy. It's part of being a normal parent to have no personal time, property or space. Come on, let's follow him.'

The children did not need to be persuaded. They were burning with curiosity. And it seemed silly to go to school now when half the day was already over. So they all took off running after Mr Green before he disappeared into the distance.

Fortunately Mr Green was not an observant man so he did not notice he was being followed by his own children, their nanny and a giant dancing bear. Plus Nanny Piggins was very good at 'tailing a perp' (which is police talk for following a criminal), having read so many detective novels. She knew the trick was that as soon as the person you are following starts to turn around, you have to freeze in the middle of what you are doing and pretend to be a lost foreign tourist by having a loud conversation about street signs in German. This ruse worked well. So Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were only a few metres behind Mr Green when they saw him disappear into the side door of the most disreputable type of building imaginable – a theatre.

'A theatre!' exclaimed Nanny Piggins. 'What on earth could he be doing in there?'

'Buying theatre tickets?' suggested Samantha.

'When have you ever known your father to voluntarily spend money on something pleasurable?' asked Nanny Piggins.

'True,' conceded Samantha.

'Perhaps he is going to assassinate a president!' exclaimed Derrick. 'Abraham Lincoln was a president and he was assassinated while he was watching a play.'

'Really?' asked Nanny Piggins. 'I hope the assassin let him see the end before he did it.'

Just then something caught Michael's eye. 'Hey, look at that sign!'

They all looked up at a sign stuck to the back of the stage door:

Open Audition for
The Amateur Theatre Society's production of
Shakespeare's Hamlet
All welcome

Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were shocked. Nanny Piggins even considered fainting, but then thought better of it, because the footpath did not look clean and she was wearing an especially lovely outfit.

'Your father is auditioning for a play!' exclaimed Nanny Piggins.

'And he's taking time off work to do it!' marvelled Derrick.

'Remind me when he comes home, I need to bite his leg,' said Nanny Piggins.

'Why?' asked Samantha.

'This is so out of character, I had better check that he's not been kidnapped and replaced with a robot clone,' explained Nanny Piggins.

'What are we going to do?' asked Michael. 'Father obviously doesn't want us here.'

'You're right. Which is why we must go in and watch. If your father is going to embarrass himself it is important there are a lot of witnesses,' said Nanny Piggins. 'Humiliation doesn't really count unless there are lots of people to constantly remind you about it for years and years to come.'

So Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children let themselves into the theatre and found seats up the back in the dark where they could watch the auditions. It soon became apparent why Mr Green was auditioning. The director of the production and president of The Amateur Theatre Society was a very attractive widow called Mrs Fortescue-Brown, and Mr Green was clearly smitten with her.

'A funny thing happened this morning at the office, Mrs Fortescue-Brown,' began Mr Green, smirking and trying to look handsome. 'I asked my clerk to fetch me the taxation code volume thirteen and he brought me back volume seven, because he couldn't read roman numerals! Ha. Ha-ha.' Mr Green had to laugh at the end of his own joke because nobody else did, because it was not really a joke. (Mistaking sentences for jokes is a very common mistake made by aspiring comedians.)

'That's lovely, Mr Green,' said Mrs Fortescue-Brown. 'Now be a good chap and sit over there until it is your turn to try out.'

Nanny Piggins was right about the auditions being enormously entertaining. This was partly because she had hot-wired the popcorn machine and they were having a lovely time throwing popcorn at Boris and watching him leap up and pirouette in mid-air before catching them in his mouth. And partly because all the people auditioning were so awful.

Some were so shy they spoke in a whisper and could not be heard. Some were so bold they yelled every line. And not one of them could act. There is a real trick to saying every word as though you have absolutely no idea what it means, and every one of these amateurs had exactly that knack. As a professional circus performer, Nanny Piggins never realised that some people could be so bad at dazzling a crowd.

'What I don't understand is that if they are so talentless at acting, why didn't they bring a cannon?' asked Nanny Piggins. 'Then at least they could finish with a bang.'

Finally it was Mr Green's turn. He walked up on stage and stood in front of the assembled crowd. Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children held their breaths in anticipation, wondering just how bad Mr Green would be. Or perhaps he would surprise them and actually be good?

They soon found out as Mr Green started to recite, 'To be or not to be . . .'

Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children instantly burst out laughing. Mr Green was even more awful than they had expected. There was something about the way his jowls quivered and his top lip sweated when he was trying to sound impressive, that really was very funny.

'. . . That is the question. Whether it is . . .' continued Mr Green.

'Make him stop!' called Boris. Not to be mean, but for health reasons, because he was laughing so hard he thought he was going to crack a rib.

Mr Green did not notice. He was so absorbed in trying to sound important he would not have noticed if a steamroller had driven through the theatre. But Mrs Fortescue-Brown was more observant. She shot to her feet, turned around and proceeded to scold Nanny Piggins and the children. (Boris quickly hid behind a plaster replica statue of the Venus de Milo.)