Nanny Piggins and the Pursuit of Justice

by R. A. Spratt

  And it was not all cake. They soon discovered that Mr Lessandro had been secretly growing tomatoes on the fire escape. So after they had all had several helpings of dessert, he whipped up a delicious pasta dish with nothing more than tomatoes, basil, lemon juice and an entire bucket of cream.

  Then Mrs Broomfield, who was normally so forgetful she could never recall her own cat’s name, suddenly remembered a delicious recipe for jammy dodgers she had been taught as a girl. So they spent the rest of the afternoon happily working away in the kitchen, fine-tuning her shortbread and jam recipe.

  Finally, as the sun began to set, Mrs Clemenceau mentioned that she had been a pastry chef during the war, so she was put in charge of organising dinner. And they ate a three-course meal of cheese soufflé for entree, chocolate soufflé for dessert and chocolate soufflé with extra chocolate for second dessert.

  ‘That was the most delicious meal I have ever tasted,’ announced Nanny Piggins as she wiped the last smear of chocolate soufflé from her snout.

  ‘What about the chocolate meringue you made for dinner last night?’ asked Michael.

  ‘Mmm yes, that was good too,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘But don’t distract me, I’m having another brilliant idea. You old people should open a restaurant.’

  ‘But we can’t do that!’ protested Mr Lessandro. ‘We’re old.’

  ‘But there are 50 of you,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘so you can share the work and take lots of naps.’

  Just then the back door burst open and a weedy 29-year-old in a suit walked in.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ he demanded.

  The old people groaned.

  ‘I knew he’d turn up and spoil our fun,’ said Mrs Hastings. ‘He’s the 29-year-old investment banker who’s in charge.’

  ‘I’ve had complaints that staff have been assaulted with a cooking ladle,’ complained the 29-year-old, ‘and that old people have been seen climbing over the neighbourhood fences, stealing fruit.’

  ‘We had to make jam somehow,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You’re the one who wouldn’t let the old people have a fruit and vegetable garden.’

  ‘We have to maintain the look of the exterior of the building,’ protested the 29-year-old, ‘or the neighbours complain.’

  ‘We’ve solved that problem. There won’t be any more complaints,’ Nanny Piggins assured him. ‘We’ve been blasting the neighbours in the face with a hosepipe if they are rude enough to poke their noses over the fence.’

  ‘Have you people been taking your medication?’ demanded the 29-year-old, speaking to the old people as though they were three-year-olds.

  ‘I’ve been medicating them myself,’ announced Nanny Piggins, ‘with proper food containing the five essential food groups – chocolate, cream, butter, sugar and cake.’

  ‘I’m calling a doctor,’ said the 29-year-old, taking out a mobile phone.

  ‘Colonel, confiscate his phone,’ ordered Nanny Piggins.

  The Colonel loved following orders, especially from his favourite pig, so he soon had the 29-year-old in a painful wristlock, forcing him to drop the phone to the floor, where Mr Bernard crushed it with several lusty blows from his oxygen stand.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked the 29-year-old.

  ‘I’m taking over this old people’s home and turning it into a five-star gourmet restaurant,’ announced Nanny Piggins.

  The old people cheered.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ protested the 29-year-old.

  ‘Why not?’ demanded Nanny Piggins.

  ‘You can’t start a restaurant without business models, cash flow assessments and market analysis,’ babbled the 29-year-old.

  ‘Pish!’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Just you watch me.’

  So Nanny Piggins set to work transforming the Golden Willows Retirement Home. She put Mrs Hastings in charge as restaurant manager, because any woman who could stage a bank robbery obviously had excellent planning skills. She made Mrs Clemenceau head chef, Mr Lessandro sous chef, and Mrs Broomfield chief chef in charge of jammy dodgers. Then Nanny Piggins forced the 29-year-old to become maître d’.

  ‘But I’m an investment banker,’ protested the 29-year-old. ‘I can’t spend the whole day away from the office.’

  ‘It’ll do you good,’ said Nanny Piggins as she lifted the car keys from his pocket. ‘The people you work for are obviously profoundly morally bankrupt if they invest in old people’s homes as a moneymaking scheme. You’re much better off here, away from their corrupting influence.’

  ‘But I want to be corrupted,’ protested the 29-year-old, ‘so I can make a lot of money and retire at 40.’

  ‘Trust me,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You’ll be fat, bald and well on the way to a terminal heart condition by forty. You’ll be much better off if you start living your life today.’

  And by the end of the week the Golden Willows Restaurant had people lining up around the block, desperate to try their delicious food. It turns out that there was a huge market of young people eager to try forbidden ingredients they had only heard of – like butter and cream – as well as a huge market of old people who could still remember the magical taste of their grandmother’s cooking.

  Even the 29-year-old had a good time. He found he was much better at seating guests and fetching drinks than he was at insider trading.

  And after dinner every night the old people put on a show. All the dinner guests were invited outside to watch the Colonel launch his flying machine and do a turn around the garden. Sometimes he made it all the way around and back to the window and sometimes he crashed into the next door neighbour’s sycamore tree; either way it was always spectacular.

  The only downside was, by the end of the week, Nanny Piggins had also made herself totally redundant. The Golden Willows Restaurant was a thriving independent business and she was back in a probation officer’s office, having only completed sixty-seven hours of community service.

  ‘Oh dear, Nanny Piggins,’ said the probation officer. ‘If you’re going to whittle away your 5000-hour community service requirement you are going to have to resist the urge to transform every institution I send you to into a huge profitgenerating organisation.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ apologised Nanny Piggins. ‘I just can’t help myself. It comes from being so very good at everything.’

  But the children were not at all sorry. They were happy to get their nanny back, at least for a short while, until the probation officer could find another suitable (or unsuitable) job for Nanny Piggins.

  Nanny Piggins had never been so bored in her life. When she agreed to chaperone the children’s school excursion as part of her community service, she had assumed they would be going somewhere interesting like a scorpion farm, or a hot air balloon race, or at the very least, a cake factory. But no, Headmaster Pimplestock had organised it, so they were traipsing around The National Transport Museum. To Nanny Piggins’ way of thinking, museums were boring at the best of times, but to have an entire museum that only featured different forms of transport was too boring to be true. If she had to look at another train or bus while the curator droned on and on about ‘kilowatts’ and ‘torque’, she was sure she would slip into a coma.

  The worst part was that the museum was supposed to be about transport but there was not a single room devoted to the history of the flying pig! Her own life story would be a thousand times more interesting than Adrian Krinklestein’s, the inventor of the cog, and he had a whole display.

  On top of that, the children were being forced to fill out a ridiculous questionnaire written by Headmaster Pimplestock to prove that they had listened to every word the curator said. Which totally prevented them from ignoring the curator and nipping off to the coffee shop for a few slices of cheesecake with their nanny.

  So Nanny Piggins was standing there, in a room full of antique Vi
ctorian water pumps, trying to keep herself awake by thinking up new recipes for chocolate ice-cream (perhaps more chocolate?), when something caught her eye. Through a doorway at the far end of the room she caught a glimpse of something red and shiny. Without thinking, her trotters were drawn towards it.

  ‘Where are you going?’ whispered Samantha as her nanny began to wander away.

  ‘As far away from that dreadful curator as possible,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Then I’m coming too,’ said Michael, dumping his questionnaire in a bin.

  Derrick followed, reasoning he was the oldest so it would be irresponsible to let his little brother get in trouble all alone.

  And Samantha chased after them because, much as she did not want to get in trouble, she did not like being the one left behind to answer the angry and difficult questions.

  So Nanny Piggins and the children left the dreary Victorian water-pump room and entered a huge airy pavilion with a high glass ceiling, so they could see the sunshine and blue sky above. But that was not the best thing about the room. The best thing was that it was chock full of dozens and dozens of aeroplanes. There were modern jets, old propeller planes and funny looking water planes. Some hung from the ceiling, some stood up on pedestals and some were parked on the ground. But the brightest and shiniest of all was the one Nanny Piggins had spotted first. It was a bright red World War I tri-plane with German insignia, so it was much much more exciting than a Victorian water pump.

  ‘What a pretty machine,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a German fighter plane from the first World War,’ explained Derrick. (He had been forced to study World War I only the previous term.)

  ‘That’s a plane?’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘I don’t believe it. Where does everybody sit?’

  ‘Well, the pilot sits there and the passenger sits there,’ said Derrick, pointing to the two openings in the chassis.

  ‘But where does the stewardess sit? And how does she get the drinks cart up and down?’ asked Nanny Piggins, totally baffled.

  ‘I don’t think they had drinks carts on World War I fighter planes,’ said Samantha.

  ‘No drinks carts!’ exclaimed a horrified Nanny Piggins. ‘Next you’ll be telling me they didn’t serve an in-flight meal!’

  ‘Well . . .’ began Samantha.

  ‘No in-flight meal!’ gasped Nanny Piggins. ‘No wonder they were at war. They must have been so unhappy.’ Nanny Piggins leaned her trotter on the wing of the plane, then immediately recoiled. ‘This isn’t a real plane! It’s a fake!’ cried Nanny Piggins.

  ‘It is?’ said Michael, totally delighted. He enjoyed it when his nanny started denouncing people. And discovering a forgery was sure to lead to a lot of denouncing.

  ‘Listen,’ continued Nanny Piggins, rapping the wing of the plane again. ‘It’s hollow and I think it’s made of canvas!’

  ‘Maybe planes were made of canvas back in the old days,’ suggested Samantha.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! What would happen if it rained?’ said Nanny Piggins.

  Samantha had the mental image of a plane all limp and floppy like a wet beach towel.

  ‘No, someone must have stolen the real plane and replaced it with this canvas replica,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Well, there’s only one way we can find out for sure.’

  ‘Call the police and ask them to bring down a forensic team to carbon date the material?’ suggested Derrick.

  ‘No, turn it on and see if it flies,’ declared Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Samantha, sitting down on the ground and taking out her lunch. Not so she could eat anything, but so she could use the brown paper bag to hyperventilate into.

  ‘But that’ll never work,’ protested Derrick.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Nanny Piggins as she walked around the plane, kicking the chocks out from in front of the wheels. ‘This is a museum, isn’t it? They are supposed to have restored everything to perfect working condition.’

  ‘But would there still be petrol in the engine?’ asked Michael.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘When the Germans lost the war I expect they had a lot more important things to think about than whether or not they had siphoned all the petrol out of their planes. Anyway, we’ll soon see.’ Nanny Piggins hopped into the pilot’s seat.

  ‘Oh dear,’ moaned Samantha as she ducked her head between her knees – partly to avoid fainting and partly so she would not have to see her beloved nanny come to harm.

  ‘Oh look!’ said Nanny Piggins delightedly. ‘The German flying ace who last used this plane left his goggles under the seat. How thoughtful of him.’

  Nanny Piggins put on the goggles and revved the engine.

  ‘It can’t be a fake, that engine sounds fine,’ said Derrick.

  ‘Oh, we won’t know for sure until we take it up,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Up where?’ asked Michael. Even he was beginning to worry, and generally he was the least inclined to worry of any boy you could care to meet.

  ‘For a spin,’ said Nanny Piggins with a joyous glint in her eye.

  The children had seen that glint before. Nanny Piggins always got it before she threw herself into one of her death-defying stunts, such as being fired out of a cannon, doing a backflip off the clothes line or returning a library book two days late.

  ‘Do you even know how to fly an aeroplane?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘I am the greatest flying pig in all the world,’ Nanny Piggins reminded him.

  ‘Yes, but the principles are rather different when you haven’t been blasted out of a cannon,’ argued Derrick.

  ‘Pish!’ said Nanny Piggins, and with that she opened the throttle, released the brake and the plane started to roll forward.

  At this point the security guard from the museum started running towards them. (Now you might be wondering why he had not taken action sooner, such as when Nanny Piggins turned on the noisy diesel engine of their 95-year-old German tri-plane. But you have to understand that the security man was a little deaf and he had fallen asleep while lip-reading the curator’s incredibly boring talk on Victorian water pumps taking place in the next room.) But an elderly man with a heart condition was never going to run down Nanny Piggins in an aeroplane.

  She shot down the full length of the hall (which was perfectly safe because the museum was so boring there were no members of the public for her to crash into) and then, just as Samantha hid her face in her jumper because she did not want to see Nanny Piggins slam into a brick wall, the plane took off. And as it lifted up into the air, the tri-plane transformed from a rickety old thing banging along the ground, into an elegant flying machine soaring through the sky. Well, as much sky as there was inside the room. Luckily for Nanny Piggins it was a huge room so she could comfortably do loops around and around.

  ‘Stop that pig!’ screamed the curator as he ran into the pavilion.

  ‘How?’ asked the befuddled security guard.

  ‘Do I have to do everything myself?’ complained the curator, and with that he leapt into a World War I British bi-plane, turned on the engine and took off after Nanny Piggins.

  Goodness knows what he thought he could do to get Nanny Piggins to come down. They might have left petrol in the engines but the restoration team did have the sense to remove the bullets from the machine guns. So all the curator could do was chase Nanny Piggins around and around, which she rather enjoyed. She did loop-the-loops and barrel rolls and weaved in between all the planes hanging from the ceiling to confuse him. Then Nanny Piggins flew towards the sun so the curator would lose sight of her, before reappearing behind him, blowing raspberries.

  Down on the ground all the school children cheered. The most boring school excursion had turned into the world’s most exciting school excursion in just a few short mom
ents.

  Nanny Piggins eventually landed voluntarily when the plane ran out of petrol and started to sputter. She glided to a perfect landing, yanking on the handbrake and rolling the tri-plane to a halt in exactly the same position she had found it.

  Unfortunately the curator was not such an adept pilot. When he tried to land he came in too fast, skidded all the way along the floor (making a mess of the patina) and slamming into the refrigerated cake stand out the front of the cafeteria, totally ruining the New York cheesecake Nanny Piggins had her eye on for afternoon tea, which so horrified Nanny Piggins that she actually started to cry. Fortunately, licking bits of New York cheesecake off the sides of the smashed refrigerated cake stand soon cheered her up.

  Many hours later, when Nanny Piggins and the children were finally allowed home, they were not in the highest of spirits. True, Nanny Piggins had not been taken away to jail, which was a good thing. (The museum had decided not to press charges because they did not want an inquiry into why two of their aeroplanes on public display had petrol in their engines.) But they had insisted that she pay for the damages, which seemed bitterly unfair given that she had not caused any herself. It was the curator who had smashed the expensive refrigerated cake stand. But Nanny Piggins did feel bad about ruining a contraption whose sole purpose was displaying cake in ideal conditions, so she agreed to these terms.

  ‘Where are we going to get twenty-thousand dollars?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘We could ask father to lend it to us,’ suggested Samantha, and they all burst out laughing at such a ridiculous suggestion.

  ‘But seriously, children,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘We do need a money-making scheme.’

  ‘We could get jobs,’ suggested Michael.