Nanny Piggins and the Accidental Blast-off

by R. A. Spratt

  The next morning, after a hearty breakfast of chocolate pudding with extra chocolate, Nanny Piggins went to her room to put on her new uniform. Her footsteps were heavy as she trudged upstairs. When she emerged a few minutes later she was wearing a white coat (which Nanny Piggins actually liked because she thought it made her look like an evil scientist), a yellow iridescent vest (which would be useful, the ice-cream van man couldn’t pretend not to see her now!) and of course she was holding the lollipop sign. Although she could not bring herself to look at it as it made her want to cry. (When the man from the council had dropped the sign off the night before, Nanny Piggins had sobbed. Until that moment she still had not given up hope that it would be entirely made of hard candy. But after five minutes of desperate licking, even she had to concede that it was definitely made of nothing more delicious than plywood and paint.)

  ‘You look lovely, Sarah!’ exclaimed Boris, which was true. Nanny Piggins had a knack for making even the most dowdy council-provided uniform seem tremendously glamorous.

  ‘Yes, I know. But I may well starve to death doing this horrible job,’ grumbled Nanny Piggins. ‘These pockets aren’t nearly big enough to hold a mud cake.’

  From the dark smears around the pockets, the children could see that their nanny had certainly made a concerted effort trying to get one in there.

  ‘You’ll be all right, Nanny Piggins,’ comforted Michael. ‘You may not get to eat a giant lollipop but at least you only have to work for one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon. That’s not bad as far as jobs go.’

  ‘I suppose,’ muttered Nanny Piggins, ‘but to be reduced to this – directing traffic – like a common street sign. And with no getting blasted out of a cannon or anything! What has my career come to? Oh well, I suppose I should just get on with it.’

  And so they got the bus down to the school and waited by the zebra crossing. It was not long before the first child appeared. She was a quiet little girl who liked to get to school early so she could sit in the library and read.

  ‘Hello,’ the bookish girl said to Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Hello,’ said Nanny Piggins glumly.

  ‘Are you the new lollipop lady?’ asked the girl.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nanny Piggins sadly. ‘And did you realise that this lollipop sign is not really a lollipop?’

  ‘No!’ said the bookish girl, appropriately appalled. ‘Then why did the old lollipop lady lick her sign all the time?’

  ‘Optimism?’ suggested Nanny Piggins. ‘Come on, I suppose you want me to help you across the road?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ said the bookish girl.

  So Nanny Piggins trudged out on to the zebra crossing and held her STOP sign up to the oncoming traffic. The cars obediently drew to a stop and the girl crossed the road. But Nanny Piggins still stood there, blocking the way.

  ‘You’re supposed to let the traffic through when there are no children crossing,’ called Derrick.

  ‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Nanny Piggins, withdrawing her sign and walking to the footpath. But there was more bounce in her step now.

  ‘You know, I think there may be more to this job than I originally thought,’ said Nanny Piggins, a twinkle beginning to emerge in her eye.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ worried Samantha.

  ‘Hmm? Oh, just that this could actually be a lot of fun,’ said Nanny Piggins. Now she was craning her neck first one way and then the other, looking up and down the street. She spotted what she was looking for when a small child turned the corner. ‘Ah, there’s another one.’ She called out to him, ‘You, child – hurry up! Come on, run! Actually, no, don’t rush. I’ll stop the traffic for you now and make them wait.’

  Nanny Piggins leapt back onto the crossing, causing much screeching of brakes as she dramatically stabbed her sign into the road (she had seen an elderly wizard do something similar in a movie recently) and held up her other hand with a snappy flick of the wrist, blocking the peak-hour traffic for several minutes while one poor five-year-old carrying a very heavy backpack (why are maths textbooks so unreasonably heavy?) struggled to the crossing, then across the street. Nanny Piggins glared hard at the motorists, before slowly turning and walking off the crossing herself.

  ‘That was fun,’ she said with an excited smile.

  ‘You’re not abusing your power, are you, Nanny Piggins?’ asked Derrick. (People often phrase things as questions when they are afraid of phrasing them as accusations.)

  ‘Oh yes, of course I am,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But it will do the motorists good. Everyone is always in such a rush these days; delaying them by a few minutes will help them realise the futility of their meaningless lives.’

  ‘I don’t think they will want to realise the futility of their meaningless lives while they are trying to drive to work in the morning,’ said Samantha.

  ‘No, but like injections, the things that are good for you are often deeply unpleasant,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Oooh look, here come two children. That means I can stop the traffic for twice as long.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ protested Derrick, as his nanny again burst back onto the crossing.

  ‘It does if I make them cross one at a time for me,’ reasoned Nanny Piggins.

  And so Nanny Piggins spent a wonderful hour directing traffic. Once she got going she found she had so much to say to the motorists. She told off people for picking their noses when they should have two hands on the steering wheel. She told off people who drove four-wheel drives for driving on the road. To her mind, if you are going to have an off-road vehicle you should drive it off the road, so she made them pull up onto the footpath and drive down all the front lawns along the street. And she made all the trucks stop and let her into their cabs so she could pull their horns. Nanny Piggins did enjoy making loud noises.

  But the best bit was when the first adult tried to cross the crossing. Nanny Piggins stood, blocking his way.

  ‘Excuse me, I need to get across the road,’ said the man politely.

  ‘Of course,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘As soon as you give me a lollipop.’

  ‘What?’ said the polite man.

  ‘I’m a lollipop lady, and the toll I charge for crossing the road is one lollipop,’ explained Nanny Piggins.

  ‘But I’ve never had to give a lollipop lady a lollipop before,’ protested the polite man.

  ‘It’s not my fault all the other lollipop ladies don’t have any imagination,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘But I don’t have a lollipop,’ complained the polite man.

  ‘That’s all right, they sell lots of lovely ones at the corner shop over there. The strawberry ones are particularly good. You should get one for yourself while you’re in there,’ encouraged Nanny Piggins.

  The polite man looked Nanny Piggins in the eye and wisely decided it was best to just do as he was told.

  And in this way, Nanny Piggins soon had pocketfuls of lollipops.

  Inevitably, forty minutes into Nanny Piggins’ shift, when traffic was backed up for five kilometres down the road, and the entire student body was hanging over the front fence watching her performance, Headmaster Pimplestock ventured out to remonstrate with Nanny Piggins. But of course he had no luck. Every time he tried to step into the street, Nanny Piggins would wave the traffic through yelling, ‘Go go go!!!’ And when he tried to call out to her, Nanny Piggins pretended she could not hear above the noise of the car engines.

  At nine o’clock the school bell rang.

  ‘We’d better be going,’ said Derrick.

  ‘Well done, Nanny Piggins,’ said Samantha encouragingly. ‘You got through an entire shift with out any children being hit by a car, and the traffic jam is not nearly as bad as when you were trying to get the cars to hit Headmaster Pimplestock.’

  ‘You’re right, I think I have a talent for this,’ agreed Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Well, we’ve got to get to class,’ said Michael.

  ‘You can’t go to school now,’ said Nanny Piggi
ns, beginning to pout.

  ‘It is a school day,’ Samantha reminded her.

  ‘And the school is right there,’ said Michael, pointing to the building not ten metres away.

  ‘And Headmaster Pimplestock has seen us,’ added Derrick, ‘so it will be difficult to persuade him that we have come down with African Sleeping Sickness today.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re on the wrong side of the road,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘and it’s 9.01 so the lollipop lady has just finished work. You’ve got no way of getting there.’

  ‘But –’ began Samantha.

  ‘She’s got a point,’ argued Michael. ‘It’s against school rules to cross without the lollipop lady. And you wouldn’t want to break school rules, would you?’ He had Samantha there. She was terrified of rule breaking in all its forms.

  ‘But if we don’t go to school,’ said Derrick, ‘what are we going to do?’

  ‘When you’ve got such a wonderful, powerful sign like this one,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘it seems a waste to let it sit around doing nothing for six hours in the middle of the day.’

  ‘But your employment contract very specifically states that you are to direct traffic for one hour before and after the school day,’ protested Samantha.

  ‘That’s only because they are worried I might have been trying to skive off and do less than they wanted,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I only want to do more. Really they are going to be grateful when they find out how conscientious and dedicated to duty I am.’

  And so they started walking towards the centre of town, on the lookout for things to stop with the stop sign. Before long they came to a building site where a crew of workers were demolishing an old house. Nanny Piggins loved heavy machinery, so she leapt out with her stop sign, bringing the entire demolition to a halt, and made the bulldozer driver let her have a go pulling the levers on his machine. She had a wonderful time. Nanny Piggins soon knocked the building down. Admittedly, it was the wrong building, but the bulldozer driver was very kind about it. He said he was impressed with her aptitude for wrecking things.

  Next they saw a lawnmower man hard at work, so Nanny Piggins waved her sign at him, bringing him to a halt and asking if they could each have a go on his ride-on lawnmower. He happily agreed, and it was a lot of fun for everyone. It had never occurred to the lawnmower man that he could use his lawnmower to write messages into peoples’ lawns (and mowing ‘Don’t forget to water me!’ into the grass was a lot more exciting than just going up and down in straight lines). It soon became apparent that having a lollipop sign was like having free tickets to a fun park.

  Finally they made it into town where there was a lot of traffic. Trucks and vans were dropping things off and picking things up from all the local businesses. At first Nanny Piggins did not know where to start. She was tempted to stop a bus and make all the office workers go home to watch daytime television. And she did think about stopping the pizza delivery boy and demanding he took all the anchovies off all his pizzas. But then she saw the most wonderful vehicle ever to roll along a road.

  ‘Look!’ cried Nanny Piggins. ‘It’s a truck from the Slimbridge Cake Factory!’

  ‘Wow!’ said Derrick in awe (he particularly loved their lemon cheesecake).

  ‘It’s so big!’ exclaimed Samantha (she particularly enjoyed their marble cake).

  ‘Just think how many jam rolls they could fit in there,’ marvelled Michael (who had a fondness for their jam rolls).

  ‘Wait here,’ said Nanny Piggins as she strode out into the road with all the authority of a power-mad lollipop lady who has only been in the job for an hour and a half. She stood in the path of the huge eighteen-wheeler full of cake and held her stop sign forward. The truck’s compression brakes hissed and shuddered loudly as the driver brought his vehicle to a halt. Then Nanny Piggins walked around to the cab window and rapped on it.

  ‘Oh, what’s she going to do?’ worried Samantha.

  ‘I bet she commandeers his vehicle,’ said Michael. He did not want his nanny to have to go on the run from the law, but if you are going to go on the run from the law, an eighteen-wheeler full of cake is the vehicle to do it in.

  The driver rolled down his window. ‘What do you want?’ he asked morosely.

  ‘I’d like some cake please,’ said Nanny Piggins respectfully. (While she did not have respect for most forms of authority, she did have a great deal of respect for cake. And to her mind a man who drove a cake truck was the highest form of authority there could possibly be. Much more important than headmasters, presidents, prime ministers or members of any royal family.)

  The children held their breath waiting for the truck driver to rudely tell Nanny Piggins to go away, but instead he did the most surprising thing. He burst into tears. And watching a fully grown man, with big muscles and tattoos on those muscles, wracking with sobs, is a heartbreaking sight. Nanny Piggins soon had him out of the cab and sitting on the side of the road, while she patted him on the back and fed him reassuring pieces of cake.

  ‘There there, it’s all right,’ she told him. ‘We are great fans of your cake. Whatever your problem is, we promise to help you.’

  ‘It’s so dreadful,’ sobbed the truck driver. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘But how can anything be dreadful when you work for the most wonderful institution in the world?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘Your cake factory brings joy to cake lovers everywhere.’

  ‘But that’s just it,’ explained the truck driver, wiping his nose. ‘Everything is changing at the factory …’ He choked up and couldn’t continue speaking.

  ‘You can tell us,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘There’s a new owner, and she stopped giving the employees free samples,’ said the truck driver, starting to sob again.

  ‘She’s done what?’ asked Nanny Piggins, utterly astounded.

  ‘We used to get free cakes every week as part of our salary,’ explained the truck driver, ‘and she’s put a stop to it.’

  Now Nanny Piggins started to cry too, for it was such a desperately sad story.

  ‘And she’s changing what the factory makes. She’s converting all the machines so they manufacture health bars,’ he continued.

  Nanny Piggins gasped. ‘But can’t you have her locked up? She must be criminally insane. Health bars are disgusting.’

  ‘I know.’ The truck driver was really blubbering now. ‘She made us all eat one.’

  Nanny Piggins clutched the truck driver to her chest. ‘You poor, poor fellow. Man’s inhumanity to cake knows no bounds. Your species can be so cruel sometimes. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.’

  ‘But what can you do?’ worried Samantha.

  ‘I’ve got a stop sign and an iridescent jacket – what can’t I do?’ said Nanny Piggins boldly. ‘As a council-employed lollipop lady it is my job to stop wrongs wherever they are committed.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure that’s what superheroes do, not lollipop ladies,’ said Derrick.

  ‘Lollipop ladies are better than superheroes,’ said Nanny Piggins dismissively. ‘Every day lollipop ladies stop hundreds of children being run over by cars, whereas superheroes only save one or two grown adults at a time.’

  And so Nanny Piggins and the children got in the truck with the truck driver and drove back to the factory. When they got there they left the truck driver to weep quietly in his cab while Nanny Piggins set out to fight for truth, justice and cake. She marched right onto the factory floor, went up to the first employee she saw and demanded, ‘Take me to your leader!’

  She then had to repeat the demand, because the employee had earplugs in. But Nanny Piggins was soon taken to see the shop foreman. He was a burly, grouchy-looking man in his early fifties. But Nanny Piggins was not intimidated. (He did not have a lollipop sign.)

  ‘I demand that you immediately stop the production of health bars and return to making the delicious cakes, beloved by all who taste them,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  The children braced themse
lves, waiting for the foreman to yell at her. But instead he gave Nanny Piggins a big hug. ‘Thank you, thank you so much!’ he gushed. ‘We’ve been waiting for someone to lead an uprising. Would you like us all to go out on strike? We’ve been wanting to ever since she unplugged the machine that makes jam rolls.’

  ‘Oh yes, I think you should immediately go on strike,’ urged Nanny Piggins. ‘I suggest you take all the cake you can carry over to the park across the street and have a big picnic while I go upstairs and find the managers responsible for these terrible decisions.’

  ‘But, Nanny Piggins, aren’t you going too far?’ protested Samantha. ‘Some people like health food bars. Isn’t it wrong to stop the factory from making them? They are healthy.’

  ‘Oh no, they’re not,’ disagreed the foreman. ‘They contain just as much sugar and fat as the cake. The only difference is they taste awful. Oh, and they’re good for your bowels.’

  ‘The human obsession with bowels never ceases to amaze me,’ said Nanny Piggins, shaking her head. ‘I’ve never understood the attraction of having a fast-acting intestinal system. Some things should not be hurried.’

  ‘That’s what I tried to tell management, but they wouldn’t listen,’ said the foreman.

  So the foreman pressed the big bell, letting all the employees know the shift was ending early. Then he let Nanny Piggins press it again, because she was so impressed with the noise. The cheering employees took armfuls of cake off the assembly lines and went out into the sunlight to enjoy themselves, while the children followed Nanny Piggins as she went upstairs to take things in hand.

  When the lift opened they stepped out into a big luxurious office suite, but there was no-one about. Except for one receptionist, sitting at her desk scoffing a chocolate mini-muffin.

  ‘Aha!’ cried Nanny Piggins.

  ‘It was a health food bar – I swear!’ fibbed the receptionist, the crumbs around her mouth giving her away.

  ‘It’s all right, we are here to fight for the rights of cake,’ declared Nanny Piggins. ‘Just tell me where the most senior person is and I’ll soon have this sorted out.’