by R. A. Spratt
‘Would you just hold still and let me slap you, for goodness sake!’ said the exasperated armadillo.
‘Why?’ asked Nanny Piggins. She could not see any good reason she should let an armadillo slap her, but she was prepared to be open-minded.
‘Because I’m trying to challenge you to a duel,’ said the armadillo.
‘You’re what?’ asked Nanny Piggins, beginning to believe that armadillos were as peculiar as they looked.
‘Oh, I understand,’ said Samantha.
‘You do?’ said Nanny Piggins, Derrick and Michael in unison, because they certainly didn’t.
‘In the olden days if you wanted to challenge someone to a duel, you slapped them in the face with a glove,’ explained Samantha.
‘Did you learn that at school?’ asked Nanny Piggins, begrudgingly beginning to feel the first dawning of respect for the education system.
‘No, I learnt it from reading lots of historical romance novels,’ admitted Samantha.
‘Then it must be true,’ decided Nanny Piggins, because she had a lot more respect for romance writers than she did for teachers.
‘The child is correct,’ declared the armadillo. ‘My name is Eduardo Montebianco and I have travelled all the way from Mexico to challenge you to a duel.’
‘Why?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘Did you steal his true love or dishonour his family name?’ questioned Samantha. ‘That’s the reason they usually have duels in novels.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But I am very glamorous. Sometimes I have a powerful effect on people without even realising. Once the head coach of the Chinese gymnastics team saw me being fired out of a cannon and was so impressed with my athleticism and grace, she immediately went home to China and made all her gymnasts put on twenty kilos by eating doughnuts.’
‘Did it improve their performance as gymnasts?’ asked Michael.
‘No. They enjoyed the doughnuts so much they all ran away to work in doughnut shops,’ admitted Nanny Piggins. ‘But they were very happy.’
‘I’m challenging you to a duel,’ interrupted Eduardo, ‘because you claim to be the “Greatest Flying Animal in all the World”.’
‘So?’ said Nanny Piggins, perfectly confident that this was true.
‘It is a lie,’ declared Eduardo. ‘For I am the “Greatest Flying Animal in all the World”.’
Now if you are paying attention, you might, at this point, question how either a pig (Nanny Piggins) or an armadillo (Eduardo Montebianco) could possibly claim to be the ‘Greatest Flying Animal in all the World’, when there are so many animals that have wings – for instance, birds. But you have to understand, for circus folk, a flying animal that uses wings is just cheating. It would be like the bearded lady sticking a toupee to her chin, or the trapeze artists wrapping themselves in bubble wrap in case they fall, or the strong man getting a friend to help him lift things. When Nanny Piggins and Eduardo talk about the ‘Greatest Flying Animal’, they both mean the same thing – being fired out of a cannon. Which is something to boast about because being fired out of a cannon is really difficult. Whereas flapping wings is really simple, if you’ve got them. Now, back to the story.
Nanny Piggins’ eyes narrowed. ‘You?’ she said, managing to compact an enormous amount of contempt into that one short word.
‘Yes, I,’ said Eduardo. ‘For I, too, belong to a circus. And I, too, am fired out of a cannon. And it offends me to have a mere woman, and a mere pig, claiming to be better than me.’
‘Really?’ said Nanny Piggins, as she looked over the armadillo from head to toe, trying to decide which part of him she was going to bite first.
‘Yes, really,’ said Eduardo. ‘So I challenge you to a duel, to prove once and for all that I am the Greatest Animal Aviationist Alive.’ (This is just a showing-off way of saying ‘Flying Animal’.)
‘Okay,’ said Nanny Piggins, deciding that the armadillo’s plated shell looked too difficult to bite, and that she would have to be content with punishing him another way. ‘Where and when?’
‘Tomorrow morning at dawn,’ declared Eduardo.
‘Fine,’ said Nanny Piggins, even though, in her opinion, the only decent thing to do at dawn was sleep.
‘We shall align our cannons side by side, then fire them to see who goes the furthest,’ continued the armadillo.
‘All right,’ said Nanny Piggins. It sounded simple enough to her.
‘And to make things interesting,’ added Eduardo, ‘we will fire our cannons across –’ he paused here for dramatic effect – ‘Dead Man’s Gorge!’
‘No!’ gasped all three Green children.
‘What’s Dead Man’s Gorge?’ asked Nanny Piggins. She was not sure if it was a geographical feature, or something you found in the pocket of a man who had died from eating too much.
‘Dead Man’s Gorge is two cliff faces either side of a gaping two hundred and nineteen foot drop into the sea,’ announced Eduardo as melodramatically as only a Latin American can.
‘Oh,’ said Nanny Piggins, as she mentally tried to picture what two hundred and nineteen feet looked like. A few quick sums gave her the answer – a twenty-storeyed building or, to put it in terms of food (which is how Nanny Piggins always preferred to think of maths), two hundred and nineteen foot-long hotdogs laid out end to end.
‘Do you accept my challenge, little pig?’ asked Eduardo rudely, ‘or will you simply surrender any claim you have made for the title of “World’s Greatest Flying Animal”?’
‘Let me answer you like this,’ said Nanny Piggins. And she picked up the glove, slapped Eduardo hard across the face and slammed the front door in his snout before he had time to blink. She had yet to prove that she could fly further than Eduardo, but she certainly had much quicker reflexes than any armadillo.
So Nanny Piggins and the Green children sat with their backs to the front door, thinking (or in Samantha’s case, worrying, because that’s what she did whenever she thought).
‘What are you going to do?’ worried Samantha. She didn’t want to see her nanny plummet two hundred and nineteen feet into the sea, or worse still, plummet two hundred and nineteen feet onto the rocks next to the sea.
‘You could lay out mattresses on the rocks,’ suggested Michael.
‘You could use a parachute,’ suggested Derrick.
‘You could run away,’ suggested Samantha.
‘Hmm,’ said Nanny Piggins, as she concentrated hard. ‘Beating a flying armadillo shouldn’t be too difficult.’
‘But you can’t do it,’ said Samantha. ‘You don’t have a cannon. And your old circus is miles away. And even if it wasn’t, the Ringmaster would never lend you his cannon.’ (The children had met the Ringmaster so they knew he was a very wicked man indeed.)
‘Piffle,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Finding a cannon is the easiest thing in the world.’
‘It is?’ asked Derrick, who would not mind having access to a cannon for dealing with Barry Nicholas, the school bully.
‘Of course,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘They always have them at war museums.’
The children could not deny this because there were indeed several large cannons outside the war museum in town.
‘But they aren’t for people to use,’ said Samantha.
‘Of course they are,’ argued Nanny Piggins. ‘Why else would they leave them outside, if they didn’t want people to borrow them?’
‘Um …’ said Samantha as she tried to think of a better explanation, then realised there wasn’t one.
‘But if we take a cannon from the war museum, won’t the war veterans think that is very rude?’ asked Derrick.
‘If you had survived some bloodthirsty and horrific war, would you rather see a cannon stuck outside a museum where grubby children and tourists climb all over it, or at Dead Man’s Gorge blasting a pig further than any pig has ever been blasted before?’
The children had to assume that, like them, the veterans would want to see the fly
ing pig. So later that day Nanny Piggins and the children caught the bus into town and went to borrow a cannon. They took Boris with them, because if you are planning to move a gigantic cannon, it is handy to have a seven-hundred-kilogram bear with you to help with the heavy lifting.
There were several cannons to choose from outside the war museum so Nanny Piggins picked the biggest (her usual policy when choosing anything). Now you might think that security guards, the police or even just good-hearted bystanders would stop this ‘borrowing’ from taking place in broad daylight. But, as it turned out, the sight of a pig, a bear and three children taking a cannon from outside the war museum was so strange that no-one thought to challenge them.
(Now I must make one thing clear – Nanny Piggins does not encourage theft. She knows stealing is wrong. It is always, always wrong. But borrowing is okay. And as Nanny Piggins always says – if you must borrow something without asking, do it in broad daylight. It gives it a veneer of respectability.)
There was some trouble getting the cannon home. It was a World War I fifteen-inch Howitzer and weighed about six tons, so there was no way it was going to fit through the door of the bus. Plus they were not sure whether the bus driver would give a cannon a ticket. Nanny Piggins thought they should if they allowed baby pushchairs on the bus. But the children suspected that the bus driver would see baby pushchairs and cannons as belonging to two separate categories.
Fortunately the dilemma was solved when Nanny Piggins had a brilliant idea. She got Derrick to distract the bus driver by pretending he had been bitten by a venomous snake. And while he writhed on the floor in pretend pain, Nanny Piggins took the belt off her dress and tied the cannon to the back bumper of the bus. So the cannon was dragged back to Mr Green’s house without any problem (although the bus did not get above five kilometres an hour the whole way).
Back at home, Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children considered what to do next. ‘We’ve got a cannon,’ said Derrick, ‘so is that it? Are you all ready for your duel?’
‘Not quite,’ admitted Nanny Piggins. ‘I haven’t been blasted out of a cannon for months. I’m out of shape.’
Boris patted Nanny Piggins comfortingly on the hand. ‘I didn’t like to say anything. But I’m glad you know.’
‘What shape do you need to be to be blasted out of a cannon?’ asked Michael, thinking of the shapes he had learnt about in geometry – squares, circles and trapezoids.
‘That’s not what she means,’ explained Samantha. ‘When someone says they’re “out of shape” they mean they haven’t been exercising.’
‘No,’ said Nanny Piggins, contradicting her. ‘When I say “I’m out of shape”, I mean I’m out of shape. My shape’s become all lean and skinny. To be a flying pig I need to be rounder.’
‘Really?’ said Derrick, as he looked at Nanny Piggins. His nanny already ate more than a football team trapped in a lift for three days with nothing to eat but a packet of breath mints. He could not begin to imagine how much she would consume if she was actually trying to gain weight.
‘Oh yes, if I am going to be blasted an enormous distance tomorrow morning, I must immediately start eating,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You see it’s all to do with physics. You remember what I taught you about Isaac Newton?’
‘He was the man who invented gravity,’ said Michael. ‘Which is why it hurts if an apple falls on your head.’
‘Exactly,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Newton also said that force equals mass times acceleration.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Derrick.
‘It means that if you’re fat you’ll fly further,’ explained Nanny Piggins.
‘Really?’ asked Samantha. She did not know much about physics but she was pretty sure it was more complicated than that.
‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘Plus the fat helps cushion your landing if you miss your target,’ added Boris.
‘Now quick, Samantha,’ instructed Nanny Piggins. ‘You had better call Hans at the bakery.’
‘What should I tell him to send round?’ asked Samantha.
‘The truck,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘stocked full of everything from the shop. And tell him to start baking as many cakes as his oven will take. This is an emergency.’
And so Hans baked and baked. And Nanny Piggins ate and ate. And the children watched with awed fascination. Perhaps more than all the other things their nanny did brilliantly, Nanny Piggins was phenomenally good at eating. It was a sight to behold. If eating was an Olympic sport, Nanny Piggins would have been the gold medallist every time. Which is probably the only reason they do not have eating at the Olympics, because they do not want the athletes to feel bad about being beaten by a lady pig.
By the time they arrived at Dead Man’s Gorge the next morning, Nanny Piggins had certainly managed to get herself ‘in shape’. She looked almost exactly like a huge round pink bullet. She had never had much of a neck but what little neck there was had now disappeared entirely.
The children and Boris pushed their borrowed cannon into position next to Eduardo’s. Nanny Piggins could not help. She was too busy rolling on the ground groaning, ‘Urrrgh uggrrr,’ because of all she had eaten.
‘I am surprised you’re here,’ said Eduardo. ‘I expected you to run away and cower in fear.’
‘Oh shut up,’ moaned Nanny Piggins. Because for some reason, overeating exhausts the part of the brain that thinks of clever things to say.
‘Shall we begin?’ asked Eduardo.
‘I’m ready when you are,’ said Nanny Piggins, which actually turned out to be untrue.
For a start, it took a while to get Boris to stop clutching Nanny Piggins to his chest and sobbing, ‘Please don’t do it! It’s too dangerous.’
Then there was another hitch. Eduardo climbed easily into the barrel of his cannon. After all, he was still working in a circus and was used to being blasted five times a night. Nanny Piggins, however, was out of practice. When she tried to get into her barrel, she soon discovered she had been a little overzealous about ‘getting into shape’.
‘You don’t fit,’ worried Samantha.
‘Thank goodness, let’s go home!’ said Boris.
‘Yes I do,’ argued Nanny Piggins, because she might be out of practice but she still knew a thing or two about pig ballistics. ‘Fetch me a big tub of butter.’
Fortunately they had a huge tub of butter in Mr Green’s car. Nanny Piggins kept it there for emergencies, such as suddenly coming across hot buns that urgently needed to be eaten.
‘Now smear it all over me,’ ordered Nanny Piggins.
So the children and Boris set to work buttering Nanny Piggins. It took longer than you might expect because Nanny Piggins got peckish and could not resist licking it off. It was not until Michael found a two-year-old out-of-date chocolate bar down the back seat of Mr Green’s car that they were able to distract Nanny Piggins long enough to finish buttering her up.
‘Are you sure this is going to work?’ asked Derrick.
‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Nanny Piggins. And she was right. Although it did take all her strength and an enormous amount of shoving from all three children and Boris to jam her into the barrel.
‘And you call yourself a flying pig,’ scoffed Eduardo.
‘I’ll be calling myself ‘winner’ as you eat my dust in a minute,’ said Nanny Piggins in a muffled voice from deep inside the cannon.
And so the moment of truth arrived. Samantha was going to do the countdown while Derrick and Eduardo’s assistant (Sanchez, the Guatemalan guinea pig), stood by, ready to fire the cannons.
‘Five, four, three, two, one!’ said Samantha as she clamped her eyes shut because she could not bear to look.
Bam!!! went the cannons as they fired loudly, blasting the two animals into the air. Eduardo shot cleanly out of his cannon and made a perfect parabolic arc in the sky. It was a beautiful flight. And very long. Sadly, not quite long enough to get him all the way across Dead Man
’s Gorge. He was only twenty centimetres short of making the other side. But twenty centimetres is a long way when there is a two hundred and nineteen-foot drop below.
‘Aaaaaaagggghhhh!!!!!’ said Eduardo as he realised he had made a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake.
But, as it turned out, he was lucky. Michael had complete faith in his nanny, but did not have the same amount of faith in the ninety-year-old Howitzer or the prevailing headwind she was being blasted into. So he had, unbeknownst to Nanny Piggins, snuck out in the night and put his mattress at the bottom of Dead Man’s Gorge. So rest assured, Eduardo did not plummet to his death.
He plummeted to his wet. Because he fell all the way down, hit the mattress, bounced off and landed in the cold wintry sea. Which would be unpleasant for anyone, but was particularly unpleasant for a desert-living armadillo from Mexico who was not used to cold weather.
Now I should tell you what happened to Nanny Piggins. Unfortunately, it is not exactly clear. It turns out (for those of you who do know about physics, you might be familiar with this) that the tighter you pack the barrel of a cannon, the further the blast goes. So if you fire a pig that only fits into a cannon with the aid of five litres of butter, three small children and a bear, then that pig is going to fly a very long way. Especially if that pig is not particularly good at maths, and she has particular difficulty with decimal places. So that instead of putting 0.02 kilos of gunpowder into the cannon, Nanny Piggins put twenty kilos of gunpowder into the cannon (for those of you who do not like decimals either, this means she used one thousand times too much).
Simply put, when Nanny Piggins blasted out of the cannon the children had no idea where she went. All they saw was a streak of pink pig flying across the sky at the speed of light. She passed over Dead Man’s Gorge and kept flying until she was a tiny pink dot disappearing over the horizon.
‘Oh dear!’ said Derrick.
