by R. A. Spratt
‘Hello,’ said Nanny Piggins, because she had forgotten to learn Chinese.
Fortunately the Chinese men seemed to understand English, because they all looked up and stared at her. They were naturally surprised to find a filthy pig dressed as a pirate suddenly arriving in their country.
‘What do you want?’ asked the biggest and scariest of the men, as he stood up and loomed over Nanny Piggins.
‘Some Chinese food please,’ said Nanny Piggins. She was not at all scared. She was prepared to pay for the food. She had found a fifty-cent piece down the back of Mr Green’s couch just the other day.
‘What?’ demanded the scary looking man in a very unfriendly manner.
Nanny Piggins looked about. He was not the only man in the room who looked unfriendly. Most of the men were frowning, some were scowling and one man in the corner was actually rocking back and forth with tears in his eyes. They all looked unhappy. Nanny Piggins could see these men needed help. Luckily, being a circus pig, she knew just how to cheer them up – with a show!
And that is just what she gave them. After three hours of her best tap-dancing, followed by knife juggling and fire breathing, the men were delighted. They were calling for more. They even sent someone to the kitchen to whip up some chow mein for her, so she would have enough energy for an encore.
Many hours later, Nanny Piggins returned to the Green house with wonderful stories about the hospitality of the men in China.
Derrick and Samantha were naturally suspicious. They knew their nanny was an amazing woman. And they were sure that she was capable of tunnelling much further than any other nanny. But they had studied some geography at school, so they were not entirely convinced that even Nanny Piggins could dig all the way through the centre of the earth to China in just eight days.
‘Are you absolutely sure it was China?’ asked Samantha.
‘Of course,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘Did it look like China?’ asked Derrick.
‘What does China look like?’ asked Nanny Piggins, because pigs are lucky enough to not be forced to study geography.
‘Did you see the Great Wall of China, the Entombed Warriors, Tiananmen Square or anything like that?’ asked Samantha.
‘I didn’t see any of those things. But there was a big grey room with lots of men in it,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘I suppose that could be China,’ conceded Samantha. ‘They have grey rooms and men in most countries.’
‘Why don’t you come and see for yourselves tomorrow?’ suggested Nanny Piggins. ‘After all, going to school one day a week should be more than enough to satisfy the truancy officer.’
‘Would we need to take our passports?’ asked Samantha.
‘Do you have passports?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘No,’ admitted Derrick.
‘Then you’d better not bring them,’ reasoned Nanny Piggins.
At ten o’clock the next morning, Nanny Piggins rang the school and told them Derrick, Samantha and Michael had come down with twenty-four-hour bubonic plague. Then they all climbed down into the tunnel and set out for China.
On emerging from the other end of the hole, it became immediately clear to the Green children that there was, indeed, no need for passports. Because they were not in China. They were in a maximum-security prison.
‘We’re going to be in so much trouble,’ said Samantha as she started to hyperventilate. She had suspected that Nanny Piggins would land them all in jail one day. But she had thought it would be through doing something wrong, not through digging a tunnel and voluntarily climbing in.
‘What are you talking about?’ demanded Nanny Piggins.
‘This isn’t China,’ explained Derrick.
‘Are you sure?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘I ate some lovely chow mein here yesterday.’
‘This is a prison,’ explained Michael.
‘A what-son?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘A place where the government locks up bad men,’ explained Michael.
‘They lock up bad men?’ asked Nanny Piggins. This took her by surprise. In her opinion the government had the most peculiar ways of doing things.
‘Yes, people who steal or cheat on their taxes or hurt other people get locked up,’ explained Michael.
‘Then why isn’t your father in prison?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
The children had to think for a moment. It was a good question.
‘Because he’s never been caught,’ suggested Derrick.
‘Prison seems like a very drawn-out way of punishing people. When I’m cross with someone I just bite them on the leg. And if I’m really cross I bite them on both legs,’ said Nanny Piggins. Not that she needed to tell the children. They had seen the teeth scars on their father’s calves. (Unlike the government, she had caught him many times.)
‘Are you going to tap-dance for us again, Nanny Piggins?’ asked Phillip, who was serving two years for stealing his grandmother’s wheelchair and taking it for a joyride.
‘No, you were such good hosts last time I visited, I just popped in to see if you’d like to share morning tea at our home,’ said Nanny Piggins with her most gracious hostess smile.
‘What?!!!’ exploded Derrick and Samantha.
Michael did not say anything. He was too busy rushing back up the tunnel to hide his teddy bear.
‘You can’t invite them over,’ said Samantha with some difficulty because she was trying to talk out the side of her mouth while still smiling at the men.
‘Why not?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘Because they’re prisoners. They aren’t allowed to leave,’ explained Derrick.
‘Piffle, I’m sure no-one will mind if we bend the rules a little,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘But that’s the whole point of prison. You have to stay in no matter what,’ said Samantha.
‘Even if there’s a half-price chocolate sale at the supermarket?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘Even then,’ confirmed Derrick
‘They must be very wicked men to get such harsh punishment,’ marvelled Nanny Piggins. ‘Still, it’s important to be polite. There is no greater crime than rudeness. They hosted me, so I must invite them over.’ Nanny Piggins turned and loudly addressed all the men. ‘Would you all like to come and visit us for morning tea?’
‘Yes, please!’ said all the prisoners.
‘Nanny Piggins!’ exclaimed Derrick.
‘They’re prisoners,’ pleaded Samantha.
‘You’ll promise to come back here again afterwards, won’t you?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘Of course,’ said the prisoners.
‘But the guards will notice that they’ve gone,’ argued Samantha.
‘That’s okay. We’ll leave a note letting the guards know where we are,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘They can’t complain about that.’
Derrick and Samantha suspected that the guards could indeed complain about that but there was no time to discuss it further. Nanny Piggins was already shepherding prisoners into the tunnel ahead of her and telling them to put the kettle on when they got to the house so she could make them some hot chocolate.
It took the children a while to relax about having forty convicted felons in their home, but once they did, even they had to admit that the morning-tea party was a success. When Nanny Piggins found out that they did not have sticky buns in prison (the most severe part of their punishment), she immediately set to work. In a tornado of flour, sugar, butter and jam, she soon whipped up the most gloriously delicious sticky buns ever. The prisoners enjoyed them so much it brought tears to their eyes. Mikey, the cheque forger, swore to give up crime altogether if she would give him the recipe.
After they had eaten, Boris performed a special ballet dance for them. He had not meant to, but he was stung by a wasp (which is what can happen when you let jam get all over your fur). Boris did some of his most spectacular flying leaps and pirouettes. Then, after the applause had finished, Nanny Piggins re-enacted a story from her pirate book
. It was a particularly good one that involved swinging on the curtains, then having a pretend sword fight up and down the mantelpiece. So naturally they all lost track of time. That was until Nanny Piggins looked at the clock and screamed, ‘Aaaaggggh!’
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Derrick.
‘It’s twelve o’clock! On the note I promised I’d have all the prisoners back by eleven forty-five,’ explained Nanny Piggins.
‘We’re going to be in so much trouble,’ worried Steve.
‘The guards don’t like it when we’re late for lunch,’ added Bruce (who was serving twelve months for poisoning his brother’s aspidistra).
‘Don’t worry,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘If you quickly hurry back along the tunnel, perhaps they won’t have noticed you’ve gone.’
‘Good idea,’ said Steve.
And so, all forty prisoners rushed out into the backyard and over to Nanny Piggins’ hole. But they did not jump in. Because someone was waiting for them.
Standing at the bottom of the pit was a very angry-looking man.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘And why is he in my hole?’
‘It’s the Governor,’ whispered Steve. ‘He’s in charge of the prison.’
‘Hello,’ said Nanny Piggins, optimistically adding, ‘would you like a sticky bun?’
But the Governor just ignored her and yelled directly at the prisoners. ‘I’m personally going to see to it that all of you have your sentences tripled! Digging an escape tunnel and breaking out is unforgivable. But to do it right before lunch, when chef has been slaving all morning over a lovely casserole, is despicable. You should be ashamed of yourselves!’
The prisoners all hung their heads.
‘I wish he wouldn’t yell’ said Boris, who, being a sensitive bear, had hidden in the compost heap.
‘But it’s not their fault,’ interrupted Nanny Piggins. ‘They didn’t dig the tunnel out. I dug the tunnel in.’
The Governor turned to look at Nanny Piggins. He had never been interrupted by a pig before, let alone one so glamorous, but he was too cross to let that affect him. ‘You dug the tunnel?!’ he roared. ‘You organised this mass breakout from my prison?!’
‘Yes,’ admitted Nanny Piggins truthfully.
‘Then I’m going to see to it that you go to jail for fifty years!’ exclaimed the Governor.
The Green children were horrified. Fifty years was an enormously long time to be without their nanny. And they knew there was no chance of Nanny Piggins getting out early for good behaviour. Good behaviour was not her strong point.
‘All right,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘All right?!’ exclaimed the children. Surely their nanny could not be giving up that easily.
‘If you’ll just step into the house for a moment while I powder my nose,’ said Nanny Piggins.
Now the children knew Nanny Piggins was up to something. She never talked about ‘powdering her nose’. If she was going to the toilet, she would say ‘I’m going to the toilet’. Apart from anything else, she did not have a nose, she had a snout. So they followed her into the house to see what would happen next.
‘While you’re waiting,’ suggested Nanny Piggins to the Governor, ‘have a sticky bun.’
Now these sticky buns looked particularly good. Even a professionally miserable man like the Governor found them hard to resist. There was snowy white icing sugar on top, then thick gooey cream as well as great big globs of strawberry jam inside, so altogether it was too much for any man to resist. Especially a man who’d only had muesli for breakfast.
‘I am feeling a bit peckish,’ he admitted.
By the time Nanny Piggins returned from pretending to ‘powder her nose’, the Governor was polishing off his seventh sticky bun. There was icing sugar and jam all over his face. And a big dollop of cream on his tie.
‘These sticky buns are spectacular,’ gushed the Governor.
‘I know,’ said Nanny Piggins, because she was always truthful but rarely modest.
‘And this hot chocolate is so … so … so chocolatey,’ added the Governor.
Which made Nanny Piggins blush with pride, because really, there is no greater compliment.
‘It’s just a shame I can’t invite you over to morning tea again,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘You can’t?’ said the Governor. He looked like he was going to cry.
‘No, if I’m serving a fifty-year jail term, I doubt I’ll find the time to make sticky buns,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘Oh,’ said the Governor.
‘And I won’t get to be in your prison,’ continued Nanny Piggins. ‘I’ll be in a women’s prison.’
‘Oh,’ said the Governor again.
Everyone in the room – all forty prisoners, Derrick, Samantha and Michael – all looked at the Governor expectantly.
‘I suppose you don’t necessarily have to go to jail,’ began the Governor.
‘I don’t?’ asked Nanny Piggins innocently.
‘Breaking into a prison isn’t nearly as bad as breaking out of one,’ continued the Governor (he could be quite reasonable when his blood sugar was high).
‘The only thing is,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘I suppose I’ll have to fill in the hole.’
‘There’s no rush to do that,’ said the Governor.
‘There isn’t?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘You might as well leave the hole there. As long as all the prisoners promise not to use it to escape.’
‘We promise,’ said the prisoners. (They did not want their sticky-bun route filled in either.)
‘Then I don’t see what harm one little tunnel causes,’ said the Governor.
‘Excellent!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘Then you can all pop in for mudcake next Thursday.’
And so Nanny Piggins was very satisfied with her time as a pirate. She had visited China and made forty-one new friends. But best of all, she had a great big hole in the garden ready to push Mr Green in next time he annoyed her.
Nanny Piggins and the children were on their hands and knees recarpeting the living room. I know this sounds like a very industrious thing to do. But I should explain that the only reason they were recarpeting the room was because they had tested to see if sulfuric acid really would burn a hole through the floor, like they had seen in a movie. And their experiment had been one hundred per cent successful.
Having completed the experiment, however, it then occurred to them that Mr Green might not be too impressed with the results. He seemed to be inordinately fond of his bland brown floor covering. He always lost his temper if anyone made a mud slippery slide over it or trod custard pie into the fibres. So having tried and failed to hide the hole with a vase of flowers (the three-hundred-year-old antique vase simply dropped through the hole and smashed in the basement), Nanny Piggins decided on recarpeting.
Fortunately, they found a piece of carpet that fit perfectly, in Miss Smith’s living room. She was an elderly spinster who lived across the road. They borrowed Miss Smith’s carpet (without asking). I know this sounds an awful lot like stealing but really it was just borrowing. Nanny Piggins was perfectly prepared to return the carpet if it ever occurred to Miss Smith to ask her whether the carpet stapled to their floor was her own.
As luck would have it, this never became an issue. When Miss Smith returned from bingo at the church hall and discovered that her living room was now carpetless, she was delighted. She thought some good Samaritan had polished her floorboards. And because Miss Smith loved ballroom dancing, floorboards were much better as far as she was concerned.
So Nanny Piggins, Derrick, Samantha and Michael were just stapling down the last corner of Miss Smith’s bright purple rug, using Mr Green’s desk stapler, when they heard a pounding at the front door.
‘Who could that be?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘It can’t be the truancy officer,’ said Michael. He knew this for a fact because he had seen Nanny Piggins tie Miss Britches to the filing cabinet in her office earl
ier that morning, using nothing but the wool unravelled from her own cardigan. (The cardigan had it coming. It was a hideous pink with bunny buttons down the front.)
‘No, she could never have undone all those knots this quickly,’ agreed Nanny Piggins.
‘Perhaps it’s a door-to-door salesman,’ suggested Samantha.
‘No, they don’t come anymore,’ said Nanny Piggins sadly. ‘You bite one salesman and they all hold it against you.’
‘He brought it on himself,’ comforted Derrick. ‘He promised to make your whites whiter. He deserved to suffer the consequences.’
The pounding at the door started up again.
‘Well, there’s only one way to find out who it is,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘We’ll just have to go to the living room and peek through the window.’
‘Or we could always answer the door,’ suggested Samantha.
‘Oh yes, I suppose we could try that too,’ conceded Nanny Piggins.
And so without peeking through the window, the letterbox, the keyhole or using the spy camera attached to the roof, Nanny Piggins flung open the front door to see who was there and immediately regretted it. For there on the doorstep was an angry-looking armadillo. (Now if you do not know what an armadillo looks like, I had better describe it. Because an armadillo is the type of animal that, if no-one told you what it looked like, you would never guess. It is most peculiar. It looks like a pig going to a costume party dressed as a tank. Like a pig, an armadillo has short legs and a snout. But unlike a pig, an armadillo is covered in a leathery, hard shell.) Then the armadillo, without any introduction or explanation, immediately tried to slap Nanny Piggins across the face with a glove.
Fortunately, however, Nanny Piggins was an eighth dan black belt in Taekwondo. Her self-defence reflexes were so super fast, she could not have let an armadillo slap her in the face even if she wanted to. She just blocked the slap. The armadillo tried to slap her again and again and again. But each time Nanny Piggins deftly blocked the blow.
