Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan

by R. A. Spratt

  ‘I knew an evil mastermind had to be behind the biscuit theft, but I never could have imagined it was her!’ declared Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Who is it?’ asked Samantha.

  ‘That is our beloved patron, the founder of the Buzzy Bees – Lady Marigold Pickford,’ said Barn Owl, who had just joined them and was now smiling fondly at the photograph.

  As Barn Owl drifted away to oversee the beanbag race in another part of the room, Nanny Piggins huddled together with Samantha and Boris. ‘She founded the Buzzy Bees?! I didn’t know her wickedness extended that far!’

  ‘But how do you know Lady Marigold Pickford?’ asked Samantha, burning with curiosity.

  ‘Great-Great-Granny Piggins looked after Lady Marigold Pickford’s children. She was their nanny,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘No way!’ said Boris. ‘Get out! That’s, like, totally surprising.’ (Boris was getting very good at pretending to be a young girl.)

  ‘Lady Marigold Pickford was unspeakably cruel,’ continued Nanny Piggins. ‘She would force her children to get out of bed at six am.’

  ‘No!’ gasped Samantha.

  ‘Every morning!’ continued Nanny Piggins. ‘And that’s not all. She forced them to do physical exercise.’

  Now Samantha and Boris both gasped.

  ‘Even when it was raining?’ asked Boris.

  ‘Even when there was something good on TV?’ asked Samantha.

  ‘Even if it was raining and there was something good on television,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘The witch!’ cried Boris.

  ‘Lady Marigold Pickford must have stolen Great-Great-Granny Piggins’ biscuit recipe while Great-Great-Granny was working for her,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Was she really that wicked?’ asked Samantha.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Great-Great-Granny Piggins would often collapse from exhaustion because Lady Marigold Pickford would allow no cake in the house.’

  Samantha gasped. She knew what this meant to a pig.

  ‘If she could force children to exercise on a rainy day then she was capable of anything,’ said Boris.

  ‘So does that mean we can go home and stop pretending to be Buzzy Bees?’ asked Samantha. ‘Lady Marigold Pickford has been dead for years and years, so there’s nothing we can do about the stolen recipe now.’

  ‘Nothing we can do?!’ said Nanny Piggins disbelievingly. ‘There are a million things we can do!’

  ‘There are?’ asked Samantha, starting to worry.

  ‘First of all, we have to get revenge,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Of course,’ said Boris, because he was Russian and revenge was big in Russia.

  ‘But it’s only a biscuit recipe,’ said Samantha. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to forget about it?’

  ‘Forget about it?!’ exploded Nanny Piggins, then, quickly struggling to control herself, continued. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to yell. I know it’s not your fault. It’s the way you’re raised. Humans have no principles. But I am a pig. I have my family honour to maintain. It is my duty to exact revenge.’

  ‘But how?’ asked Samantha.

  ‘Just watch,’ said Nanny Piggins darkly as she climbed up on a chair and addressed the whole group. ‘Attention, everybody. I have decided to destroy the Buzzy Bees by starting my own rival organisation – the Pig Scouts!’

  And that is exactly what she did. As it turned out the Pig Scouts was actually a brilliant idea. In a few short weeks they became much more popular than the Buzzy Bees. Because, as the large Pig Scout posters Nanny Piggins stuck up all over town made clear, the Pig Scouts had a much more sensible philosophy. The Buzzy Bees were always taught to ‘be prepared’ but Nanny Piggins taught the Pig Scouts to ‘be unprepared’. Because being unprepared made life much more interesting.

  While the Buzzy Bees taught girls how to light fires, the Pig Scouts learnt to put out fires. Which, as Nanny Piggins said, ‘is a much more important skill. Anyone can light a fire. I do it all the time. Sometimes without even realising, whereas putting a fire out can be quite hard work.’

  The Buzzy Bees earned badges for ‘Needlepoint’, ‘Orienteering’ and ‘Semaphore’. All completely useless skills according to Nanny Piggins. So the Pig Scouts earned badges for really important things like ‘Eating’, ‘More eating’ and ‘Digestion’. And most importantly, Pig Scouts were taught to keep these badges in a drawer. And never ever sew them on their clothes, because it would only ruin a designer outfit.

  The uniform of the Pig Scouts was much better than the Buzzy Bee uniform. ‘Our uniform is to wear no uniform,’ said Nanny Piggins at their first meeting. ‘Everyone has to dress differently. In fact, if any two girls turn up to Pig Scouts wearing the same clothes they will be immediately sent home to change.’ This did tend to delay the start of meetings quite a lot, but it was worth it because everybody looked fabulous.

  Instead of ‘Dollar-for-Deeds’ week, where Buzzy Bees asked friends and neighbours for money in exchange for doing household chores, the Pig Scouts had ‘Dollar-for-No-Deeds’, where they got people to pay them for not doing household chores. This was an enormous success. It turns out most people would much rather not have their car washed, floor swept or lawn raked by a small child who has no idea what they are doing.

  But most importantly of all, the Pig Scouts planned their own biscuit drive. And in her bid to totally cripple the Buzzy Bees, Nanny Piggins came up with a master stroke. She took her great-great-granny’s biscuit recipe and made it even more delicious (by adding choc-chips). Nanny Piggins knew that once the Pig Scout biscuits went on sale, no-one would ever want to buy a Buzzy Bee biscuit again.

  So by the end of the month, Nanny Piggins had brought all the local Buzzy Bee units to their knees. The only girls turning up to meetings were the ones related to the leaders and one eight-year-old, who was frightened of Nanny Piggins after she yelled at her for eating a bacon sandwich.

  Nanny Piggins’ scheme of revenge came to its glorious conclusion when Barn Owl turned up at Mr Green’s doorstep in tears.

  ‘Do come in,’ said Nanny Piggins. She could be gracious now that she had won.

  Barn Owl went into the living room and collapsed in a chair, sobbing. ‘Please, please, you have to stop this. If the Pig Scouts spread out nationally, then internationally, the Buzzy Bees will be finished.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘But why would you set out to destroy an organisation that only strives to do good works in the community and provide healthy outdoor activities for young girls?’ asked Barn Owl, as Samantha handed her a fresh tissue so she could weep some more.

  ‘Because there are some things much more important than good deeds and healthy children,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Such as my family’s sacred biscuit recipe being stolen by the Buzzy Bees!’

  ‘The biscuit recipe!’ exclaimed Barn Owl. ‘It comes from your family?’

  ‘Of course! No-one but a Piggins could devise a biscuit that delicious,’ said Boris. He was proud of his sister.

  ‘Then the legend is true,’ said Barn Owl, a look of awe upon her face.

  ‘What legend?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘According to Buzzy Bee lore, a great pig with super culinary powers gave the biscuit recipe to Lady Marigold Pickford shortly after the Buzzy Bees was founded,’ explained Barn Owl.

  ‘Hah,’ scoffed Nanny Piggins. ‘Why on earth would my great-great-grandmother share a biscuit recipe with someone as unworthy as a non-pig?’

  ‘Apparently she did it to shut Lady Marigold Pickford up,’ said Barn Owl. ‘I believe she could be a bit of a nag.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ conceded Nanny Piggins. ‘The Pigginses have always used food as a way of shutting people up. It is also good for drawing people out, getting people to reveal secrets and persuading people to spontaneously do cartwheels.’

  ‘So can we call a truce?’ begged Barn Owl.

  ‘Better than that,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I will entirely disband the
Pig Scouts.’

  ‘Why?’ exclaimed Samantha. ‘Things are going so well.’

  ‘Because I don’t believe in organisations,’ explained Nanny Piggins. ‘They’re fine when you need to get revenge for your family’s stolen biscuit recipe. But girls don’t need an organisation to teach them how to be girls. Girls are much better off figuring out how to be girls for themselves.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree with you less,’ said Barn Owl.

  ‘I know,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘That is why you are a middle-aged woman wearing a uniform and playing with schoolgirls. Whereas I am an internationally renowned, incredibly glamorous, flying pig.’

  So Barn Owl left a happy Buzzy Bee leader. And Nanny Piggins graciously refrained from kicking her in the bottom as she walked down the front steps. The Pig Scouts were disbanded before their biscuit drive had even begun. So Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were able to spend a happy week eating their way through two hundred cases of delicious choc-chip biscuits.

  ‘Nanny Piggins! Nanny Piggins!!’ shrieked Michael.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Nanny Piggins. Which just goes to show what a caring nanny she was, because Nanny Piggins was watching her favourite soap opera, ‘The Young and the Irritable’, with Derrick, Samantha and Boris. And normally if anyone tried to speak to Nanny Piggins while Bethany was telling Crevasse that their son was really his brother’s nephew’s father, Nanny Piggins would have pretended she was deaf until the commercial break, then soundly told them off for interrupting her. But Nanny Piggins could tell from the note of horror in Michael’s voice that something serious was going on (not as serious as Bethany’s twin sister coming out of a coma on ‘The Young and the Irritable’, but still pretty serious).

  ‘I found this,’ gasped Michael, as he waved a screwed-up scrap of paper.

  ‘Found it? You haven’t been climbing into dumpsters again? What have I told you about that?’ demanded Nanny Piggins.

  ‘I must never climb into dumpsters without you,’ chanted Michael, ‘because it’s not fair to let you miss out on all the fun.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Nanny Piggins approvingly.

  ‘But I didn’t find this in a dumpster,’ said Michael. ‘I found it in the bin in Father’s office.’

  ‘You were searching your father’s rubbish bin?’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘Why? We only searched it yesterday.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t searching,’ explained Michael. ‘I was just looking for something unimportant to spit my gum into, like his cheque book, when I found this.’

  Nanny Piggins looked more closely at the crumpled piece of paper. She smoothed it out on her thigh. It was a handwritten note, with lots of crossings out and corrections, written by Mr Green.

  It read … Wealthy attractive lawyer, who drives a Rolls Royce, seeks wife to clean house and look after children. Applicants must not pester me with problems, concerns or any type of conversation.

  ‘What is this?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

  ‘It’s a personal ad,’ said Derrick.

  ‘A personal what?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Advertisement,’ said Derrick. ‘If you’re lonely and you want to meet someone, you can put an advertisement in the newspaper saying what type of person you’re looking for, and if anyone is interested, they write back.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous. There are people everywhere. The streets are full of them. If Mr Green wanted to meet someone he could just walk out his front door,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘I don’t think Father wants to meet someone,’ said Samantha. ‘He just wants to get married. If he could do that without ever meeting the woman I’m sure he would.’

  ‘It’s all very well for him to get a wife from the sad, lonely women who read newspapers,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘but that is no way to find you a mother.’

  ‘I don’t know what we can do about it,’ said Derrick.

  ‘Fetch me the bus timetable!’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Maybe there’s time to go into town and burn down the newspaper office before they print their next edition.’

  ‘We can’t do that,’ said Samantha.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

  ‘“The Bold and the Spiteful” is on in five minutes,’ said Samantha.

  ‘Good point,’ said Nanny Piggins. (‘The Bold and the Spiteful’ was Nanny Piggins’ second favourite soap opera. She was not going to miss it just to burn down a newspaper office.)

  ‘We will have to come up with another solution,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘We could always do nothing,’ suggested Boris. Bears were very good at doing nothing. They did absolutely nothing for four months every winter when they hibernated. This took a lot of willpower and an awful lot of videotape, because Boris didn’t like missing ‘The Bold and the Spiteful’ either.

  ‘Hmm … nothing, I like that idea,’ mused Nanny Piggins. The commercial break was coming to an end and she secretly wanted to keep watching her soap opera.

  ‘After all, Mr Green can place an advertisement,’ said Boris. ‘But no-one in her right mind would want to marry him once she’d met him.’

  ‘Excellent point,’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘They don’t allow newspapers in lunatic asylums, do they?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Samantha.

  ‘And blind and deaf people can’t read newspapers, can they?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

  ‘No,’ agreed the children.

  ‘And who else would apply?’ concluded Nanny Piggins.

  ‘No-one’ seemed the obvious answer. So Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children went back to watching their program.

  Unfortunately, whether because not all lunatics are in asylums, or because lunatic asylums have such low and easy-to-climb walls, Boris’ plan to do nothing did not work. Mr Green was inundated with replies. Every day the letterbox was filled with perfume-drenched letters. Many with pink or lilac stationery, and some even sealed with a lipstick kiss.

  On the bright side, however, Mr Green was too stupid to think of monitoring his mail. So Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were able to have a lovely time every afternoon, steaming open the envelopes and reading all the letters. Of course they were not able to read all the letters. Some were not written in English. Some were written in English but did not make any sense. And one was entirely written in marmalade, so it soon became illegible because Boris could not resist licking it.

  ‘These letters are disgusting,’ said Nanny Piggins after reading the fiftieth putrid love poem admiring Mr Green’s wealth and Rolls Royce. ‘We had better destroy them all.’

  ‘Isn’t that a little unfair to Father?’ suggested Samantha. ‘Maybe he is lonely and it would be nice for him to get remarried.’

  Nanny Piggins, Derrick, Michael and Boris stared at Samantha for a moment. No-one knew quite what to say. ‘You have met your father, haven’t you?’ asked Nanny Piggins kindly. ‘Do you honestly think getting married would make him happy? Unless they change the law and make it legal to marry a tax legislation book.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Samantha.

  The problem was that Samantha read a lot of romance novels. So on some level she secretly hoped that her father had just been pretending to be mean and uncaring for the last nine years and that secretly he was nice and normal.

  ‘Just because these women are clearly desperate, deranged and criminally sociopathic,’ continued Nanny Piggins, ‘does not mean they deserve to be exposed to your father. I suggest we burn all the letters and bury the ashes in a deep hole down the far end of the garden.’

  And that is exactly what they did. The letters made quite a merry fire once Nanny Piggins poured some petrol on them. And the children were able to toast marshmallows over the embers of their father’s romantic aspirations.

  Unfortunately Nanny Piggins had underestimated just how much some single women want to get married. It never occurred to her that one of them would have the audacity to actually come to the house. And so, the next day when the doorbell rang, Nanny P
iggins wishfully assumed it was a lost pizza delivery boy who was going to give them free pre-paid pizzas. She flung the door open, only to be confronted by a woman standing right there on their doorstep.

  The words, ‘Yummy! Give me the pizzas …’ died on Nanny Piggins’ lips.

  One look at the beautiful petite brunette with her peaches and cream complexion and sparkling brown eyes (magnified alluringly by horn-rimmed glasses), and Nanny Piggins knew she was in trouble.

  ‘Hello, I’m here about Mr Green’s personal advertisement,’ said the Mrs Green-want-to-be.

  ‘Go away!’ screamed Nanny Piggins as she immediately tried to slam the door.

  But this woman, like Nanny Piggins, had surprising strength for her diminutive stature. As soon as Nanny Piggins moved to slam the door, she jammed her shoulder into it, and a pushing match ensued. Nanny Piggins and the Mrs Green-want-to-be both pushed as hard as they could. But the door never wavered more than a millimetre in either direction.

  ‘Go away,’ grunted Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Let me in,’ wheezed the Mrs Green-want-to-be.

  The children rushed out into the hallway to see what their nanny was doing.

  ‘Can we help?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t let your father see her,’ panted Nanny Piggins.

  Mr Green was practically never at home. He spent as much time as he possibly could at work, preferably on business trips, so he could avoid his children as much as possible. To find Mr Green at home was actually incredibly difficult. You would have to watch the house like a hawk to know that he was there. So either the Mrs Green-want-to-be was incredibly lucky or she had been hiding in the bushes across the street with a pair of field binoculars for four days.

  When Mr Green was at home he had one rule. ‘Children must be neither seen, nor heard, nor smelled, and definitely not touched.’ He had this laminated onto palm cards and given to each of the children. If Derrick, Samantha or Michael was ever caught breaking this rule he got very cross. (You could tell because his neck turned red. He never actually told the children he was cross, because that would involve making eye contact, and he tried to avoid that.)