by R. A. Spratt
‘Crystal clear,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I have both perfect hearing and a comprehensive understanding of English so there is no need to raise your voice to me.’
‘These three children will attend school every day. With-out-fail,’ barked Mr Bernard. ‘I am not some wishy-washy social worker. I have jumped out of aeroplanes, swum swollen rivers, hiked across deserts and fought enemy agents with nothing but my bare hands. So if you keep these children out of school there is nothing you can do to stop me hunting them down and dragging them back here.’
‘Oh really?’ said Nanny Piggins as she narrowed her eyes and glared at the new truancy officer. The children all took a step back. They had seen that look before. Nanny Piggins did not like to be told she could not do something.
‘Yes, really,’ said Mr Bernard. ‘Don’t try to test me. I am way out of your league.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘Yes, we will,’ said Mr Bernard.
They both glared at each other for several minutes, neither wanting to be the first to look away.
‘Um,’ said Headmaster Pimplestock, ‘I do have some paperwork to do. If I could have my office back?’ (The problem with hiring the only truancy officer capable of intimidating Nanny Piggins was that he terrified Headmaster Pimplestock.)
‘All right then,’ said Mr Bernard, ‘you’re dismissed.’
‘Thank you,’ said Headmaster Pimplestock, who actually started to leave the room himself before he realised that Mr Bernard was talking to Nanny Piggins.
Nanny Piggins turned to the children. ‘Come along, let’s go home.’
‘No,’ snapped Mr Bernard. ‘It’s one o’clock.’
‘So?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘On a Tuesday. The children can’t go home,’ said Mr Bernard, his voice starting to rise again. ‘They are supposed to be in class right now!’
‘Oh, you want to start this new ridiculously strict regime today? All right, if you insist,’ said Nanny Piggins. She turned to the children, ‘I’ll see you when you get home.’ She then kissed each of them, picked up their frogs and left.
When the children got back from school they rushed to speak to their nanny. They found her in the kitchen working on her chocolate macaroon recipe.
‘What are you going to do about the new truancy officer?’ asked Derrick.
‘Do? Oh nothing,’ said Nanny Piggins, testing (eating) her seventy-ninth macaroon.
‘Nothing?’ asked Michael. He had fully expected his nanny to have concocted a scheme to dangle Mr Bernard over a swimming pool full of raspberry jelly, or something equally exciting.
‘I did think about punishing him for being rude,’ admitted Nanny Piggins, ‘but then I thought, it’s his first day on a new job, he is probably feeling a little uncertain and a little out of his depth. So it would be much kinder of me to leave him alone for a few weeks while he settles in.’
‘Leave him alone?!’ Derrick was amazed.
‘I don’t take you out of school just to punish the truancy officer, you know,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘Except that time you wanted to punish the truancy officer for ringing the doorbell in the middle of The Young and the Irritable,’ Samantha reminded her.
‘Oh yes, except for that one time, but she totally deserved it,’ said Nanny Piggins.
The children nodded their agreement. It had been a particularly good episode in which Bethany had discovered that she was secretly her own twin sister.
‘No, I think for a while, just to be kind to Mr Bernard, I will allow you to attend school the full four days a week,’ announced Nanny Piggins.
‘School is five days a week,’ said Derrick.
‘Really?!’ said a shocked Nanny Piggins. ‘That is an awful lot! Oh well, I suppose it won’t hurt you to go for the full five days, for a week or two, if I make sure you have plenty of cake in your schoolbags.’
And so for three whole days Nanny Piggins allowed the Green children to attend school, provided they each took a huge suitcase full of treats with them, so they would not pass out from hunger or be forced to eat the rubbish (salad sandwiches) sold at the tuckshop.
But then, on the fourth day, something totally unexpected happened. The Green children genuinely got sick. Now the Green children normally got so much fresh air, sunshine and vitamin C (in the form of lemon cake) that they never got ill. So for them to actually catch a cold was very unusual. When the three of them woke up sneezing, coughing and running a fever Nanny Piggins insisted they stay in bed, eat lots of chocolate and watch lots of medicinal television.
‘But what about Mr Bernard?’ protested Michael. ‘We’ll all get in trouble.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You are actually sick. I’m sure Mr Bernard will have the sense to see that you can’t go down to a crowded school when you are packed full of dangerous virus cells ready to leap out of your bodies and attack the other children. I’ll take care of it.’
Nanny Piggins went downstairs and rang the school. ‘This is Nanny Piggins,’ she said. ‘I am ringing to inform you that Derrick, Samantha and Michael will not be attending school today because they have caught colds.’
‘Really?’ said the secretary on the other end of the line. She was quite disappointed. You see, there were three secretaries in the school office and when they saw the Green’s home number come up on the caller ID, they always fought over who was going to take the call, because Nanny Piggins had such spectacularly entertaining excuses.
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 a
nd 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 t
he 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!’
