Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan

by R. A. Spratt

  So Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children got back in the car and continued sniffing. Her snout led them out of the city, through the suburbs and into the countryside. They drove through valleys, over hills and around lakes.

  ‘Can your nose really smell something this far away?’ asked Michael.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘There was once a man in Denmark who didn’t have a bath for three years. Eventually all the pigs of the world got together and wrote him a letter, because we could all smell him.’

  ‘Did he take a bath?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘Not voluntarily,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘A swarm of angry pigs from Sweden crossed the border and pushed him in a lake.’

  ‘No way!’ exclaimed Michael.

  ‘Oh yes, which is why it is important to take a bath at least once a month. Because Swedish pigs have terrible tempers,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Boris. ‘I once got bitten by a Swedish pig just because I forgot to return a book he lent me.’

  ‘Stop the car!’ screamed Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Another ice-cream van?’ asked Boris.

  ‘No, the smell. It is at its most foul,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘What I would give to have another banana to shove up my snout right now.’

  ‘I’ve got an apple,’ volunteered Michael.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘My snout is big, but not that big.’

  And so they all got out of the convertible and followed Nanny Piggins on foot as she sniffed her way across a field, down a hill and into a gully.

  ‘Urgh, it’s so sickening. I almost feel like throwing-up the eight jam doughnuts I had for breakfast,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘You had twelve jam doughnuts for breakfast,’ Samantha reminded her.

  ‘I wouldn’t throw them all up. I have to maintain my strength,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘So is the hole nearby?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘Yes, in fact, if Michael took another step forward, he would plummet into the hole and meet certain death when he landed on the enormous pile of truffles at the bottom,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  Michael took a hasty step back. The others peered at the hole in front of him. It did not look like a hole because it had been boarded up. But the wooden boards were rotting with age. And now even the children could smell that there was something stinky deep within.

  ‘Right,’ said Nanny Piggins, as she took a crowbar out of her handbag. She always carried a crowbar in case she had to borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbour. (If they are not home you can use the crowbar to let yourself in. And if they are home, you can use the crowbar to hit them over the head.)

  Nanny Piggins had soon levered up the wooden planks. And they all peered into the hole.

  ‘It’s an abandoned mine shaft,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I dumped the truffles in here because it saved me having to dig a hole.’

  ‘I thought you liked digging holes,’ said Michael.

  ‘I do,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘But when you’ve got an armful of odorous truffles, you want to get them deep in the ground as quickly as possible.’

  So Nanny Piggins quickly rigged up some abseiling gear (which fortunately the Colonel kept in the boot of his car on the off-chance Nanny Piggins agreed to elope with him) and they lowered Michael into the hole.

  At first the mine shaft just seemed to disappear into blackness. But as Michael slowly descended, the torch Nanny Piggins had sticky-taped to his head began to illuminate the bottom. He could not believe his eyes. The ground at the bottom of the mine shaft was not visible because it was covered in truffles. Ugly brown knobbly truffles were stacked everywhere three feet deep.

  ‘Wow!’ said Michael. Because it is hard to think of clever things to say when you realise you are about to become incredibly rich.

  A few hours later, Nanny Piggins and the children were dragging big garbage bags full of truffles into Pierre’s restaurant. There were tears in the French chef’s eyes as he smelled the ugly little lumps of fungus.

  ‘Sacre bleu!’ exclaimed Pierre (which is French for ‘Gosh!’). ‘This is an avalanche of truffles. With these I will be able to make the finest cordon bleu cuisine in the country.’ Pierre wrapped Nanny Piggins in a big hug. Then he started kissing Boris and the children repeatedly, on one cheek, and then the other.

  ‘Ahem,’ said Nanny Piggins, interrupting his joyous effusions. ‘There is the little matter of payment.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Pierre. ‘This huge amount of truffles is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And it will be worth every penny. Let me fetch my cheque book.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Nanny Piggins, stopping him by grabbing his hand. ‘I think you can do a little better than that.’

  ‘Better than money?’ said Pierre, looking confused. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re a chef, aren’t you?’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Why would I take payment in the form of money when I could take payment in food?’

  ‘You will give me all these truffles in exchange for a meal?’ queried Pierre, wondering if the pig was crazy.

  ‘Yes, and don’t you try to get out of it,’ threatened Nanny Piggins, ‘or we will take these truffles home and start flushing them down the toilet, which is what I really should have done with them in the first place.’

  ‘Non, non, non, don’t do that,’ protested Pierre. ‘If it is a meal you want, I shall cook you a meal, the finest gourmet meal you have ever eaten. A meal worthy of the greatest snout in the world!’

  Now you would think that the story ends here, with Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children finishing their day by sitting down to enjoy a lovely gourmet meal. Unfortunately that is not quite how it went. You see, Nanny Piggins had eaten an enormous amount of food in her lifetime, and an enormous amount of what she considered delicious food – namely cake. But she had never actually eaten a gourmet meal. And let us just say that her disgust for the smell of truffles did not come close to matching her disgust for the size of Pierre’s portions. Nanny Piggins did not like being short-changed when it came to food. And sadly, it is a strange fact of life that the finer and more expensive the restaurant, the smaller and tinier the food they serve you.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Nanny Piggins, as Pierre set the first course in front of her.

  ‘Your entrée. Vegetable confit,’ said Pierre.

  ‘You mean this isn’t the after dinner mint?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

  ‘No,’ said Pierre.

  ‘It’s the size of an after dinner mint,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘We don’t serve after dinner mints,’ said Pierre.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘It would put the size of your portions to shame.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Pierre.

  ‘I want to know why there is so little food on my plate?’ Nanny Piggins demanded loudly.

  ‘This exquisite small dish is meant to stimulate the palate,’ protested Pierre.

  ‘And why is it all stacked up? If you’re only going to put half a mouthful on the plate, why don’t you spread it out so I can see what I’m eating?’ accused Nanny Piggins.

  ‘HOW DARE YOU!’ yelled Pierre. ‘I am the finest chef for a thousand miles!’

  ‘Chef?! Ha!!’ yelled back Nanny Piggins. ‘Starvation organiser, that’s what they should call you!’

  And so Nanny Piggins and Pierre yelled at each other for a long time. She would have thrown the food at him but it was not big enough to hurt him so she did not bother. Pierre insisted that it was award-winning cuisine; Nanny Piggins insisted that it wouldn’t satisfy a petite mouse.

  In the end Nanny Piggins stormed out, Boris and the children followed her and they enjoyed a lovely meal at the pizza joint next door.

  ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out with the truffles,’ said Samantha. ‘Are you terribly disappointed you didn’t sell them?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘It is always better to accept food instead of
money. Because you can’t eat money. Well, you can but it will make you very sick if you eat a lot of it. I had no way of knowing that Pierre was such a terrible chef.’

  ‘A lot of people think Pierre is a very good chef,’ Derrick pointed out.

  ‘A lot of people will let an odorous, stinking truffle grow in their garden and not bother to dig it up and burn it. Which just goes to show how silly most people are,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  And so Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children enjoyed their pizza meal and returned home satisfied with their day’s work. Sure, they had missed out on hundreds of thousands of dollars. But they had enjoyed a lovely day not going to school, and that was priceless.

  Nanny Piggins and the children were crouched outside the dining room with their ears pressed to the door. They had been waiting there for a full eight minutes but they could still hear the sound of Mr Green chomping away at his hi-fibre cereal.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ asked Michael. ‘Why won’t he go away?’

  ‘He’s usually been at the office for hours by now,’ said Derrick.

  ‘We can’t eat with him still in there,’ said Samantha. ‘We won’t be able to digest our food.’ (Just being in the same room as Mr Green had an unpleasant effect on his children’s intestines.)

  ‘He must be up to something,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Perhaps his watch is broken,’ suggested Samantha.

  ‘Perhaps he’s gone insane,’ suggested Derrick.

  ‘Or,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘perhaps he wants to talk to us.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Derrick, racking his brain trying to remember the last time his father had wanted to talk to him.

  ‘I’m sure it could be any number of diabolical reasons. But there’s only one way to find out. We’ll have to go in,’ declared Nanny Piggins, as she took hold of the doorknob.

  ‘No!’ shrieked Michael, as he grabbed his nanny’s hand. ‘Can’t we go to school hungry instead?’

  ‘Michael Green! How could you say such a thing?’ admonished Nanny Piggins, genuinely horrified. ‘I will not allow anyone to go anywhere feeling hungry. I’d sooner hit your father over the head with a fruit bowl and drag his unconscious body out to the garden first.’

  ‘Is that your plan?’ asked Derrick hopefully.

  ‘Not exactly. I haven’t been paid yet this month so I’d rather avoid hitting him until after then,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Come on, children, brace yourselves.’

  And with that Nanny Piggins threw open the door and stepped into the dining room.

  Fortunately Mr Green wanted to eat breakfast with his children exactly as much as they wanted to eat breakfast with him. So they had barely entered the room before Mr Green leapt up from his seat and snatched up his briefcase.

  ‘Ah, Nanny Piggins,’ he said while striding towards the doorway. ‘How lucky I should see you. I can’t make the school’s fundraising dinner tonight. You’ll have to go for me.’

  He almost made it out the door before completing this sentence, but not quite. Nanny Piggins stuck her leg out and tripped him. So instead of getting into his vomit-yellow Rolls Royce and speeding away, Mr Green lay sprawled on his dining room floor wondering what had happened.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Green. What was that you said?’ asked Nanny Piggins, spreading marmalade on her toast as if she had not just brutally sent him to the floor.

  Mr Green got up, a little shaken, and turned to face his family. The children were eating quite happily now. While eating with their father took all the fun out of food, eating with their father sprawled on the floor made food taste twice as delicious.

  ‘Er …’ said Mr Green.

  ‘I understand that you want me to go to a dinner tonight,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But I don’t understand how you intend to make it worth my while.’

  ‘For the pleasure of it?’ began Mr Green.

  Nanny Piggins just shook her head.

  ‘For the usual amount of chocolate mudcake?’ suggested Mr Green.

  ‘Yes, I think that will do it,’ agreed Nanny Piggins.

  So after successfully blackmailing Mr Green and finally allowing him to go to work, Nanny Piggins turned to the children to find out just what she had agreed to.

  ‘Headmaster Pimplestock organises this dinner every year,’ explained Derrick. ‘You pay ten times what it’s worth for a plate of overcooked chicken.’

  ‘Then during dessert, when you’ve finally got something decent to eat, they distract you by auctioning off things nobody wants,’ added Samantha.

  ‘But everybody bids because they’re bored and they want to be allowed to go home,’ concluded Michael.

  ‘And it’s legal to subject parents to substandard food and force them to buy things they don’t want?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Samantha. ‘Schools do it all the time.’

  ‘I can see I should have asked Mr Green to give me twice as much cake as usual,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Oh well. I’m sure I’ll find some way to amuse myself once I’m there.’

  And she did. Nanny Piggins was very good at amusing herself in otherwise unpleasant circumstances. For a start, she took Boris with her. It was normal to take your husband or wife, and since Nanny Piggins did not have either, she thought her brother would do. It is amazing how taking along a ten-foot dancing bear always manages to cheer up a situation.

  Headmaster Pimplestock was greeting all the parents at the door. He looked nervous when he saw Nanny Piggins. Even though she was only four foot tall, she scared him. It was something to do with her piercing brown eyes and the fact that she kept ringing up and threatening him every time the children were sent home with maths homework. But when he saw Boris, a looming giant of a bear, that was too much. The headmaster looked like he was going to faint.

  ‘Er, I’m afraid, Miss Piggins, that pets are not allowed at the dinner,’ said Headmaster Pimplestock.

  ‘I should think not,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘It would be cruelty to animals to subject them to substandard food and boring speeches. If you did let pets in I’d have to report you to the RSPCA.’

  ‘I’m referring to your …’ the headmaster tried to indicate Boris without actually pointing.

  ‘My what?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Your b-e-a-r,’ spelt out Headmaster Pimplestock.

  ‘I’m not one of your students so I absolutely refuse to take part in a spelling test,’ declared Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Your bear, we can’t let in your bear,’ whispered the headmaster.

  ‘He’s not my bear,’ said Nanny Piggins loudly. ‘He is my brother. And he’s a lot cleaner and more hygienic that the humans you let in. I saw the state of your science teacher’s fingernails.’ (All the conversation in the hall fell silent as everyone in the room followed Nanny Piggins’ outstretched trotter to see exactly which science teacher she meant. And poor Mr Sims made it doubly clear by trying to hide his hands behind his back.) ‘How dare you cast aspersions about my brother when your own humans are not up to scratch. Come along, Boris.’

  Nanny Piggins and Boris strode into the hall and the headmaster, realising there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, decided to pretend that the conversation had never happened.

  Derrick, Samantha and Michael were all at the dinner too. Children were being used by the school as waiters and dishwashers to save money (and violate child labour laws). So Nanny Piggins was able to get the children to point out their more unpleasant teachers.

  She made Derrick identify his geography teacher, Mr Doyle. Just the previous week, Mr Doyle had ‘accidentally’ spilt coffee on Derrick’s diorama of a volcano and given him a ‘D’ when it failed to erupt. As soon as Nanny Piggins knew who he was, she crawled under the tables to bite his leg. Actually she bit the leg of the woman sitting next to him first. But that was Mrs Doyle and she was just as unpleasant as her husband so it did not matter.

  Then Nanny Piggins made Samantha point out her art teacher, Mrs Anderson. Mrs Anderson had made
Samantha cry the previous week when she said her still life of a banana lacked imagination. The truth was that it did lack imagination. Samantha knew that and Nanny Piggins knew that. But in Nanny Piggins’ opinion a teacher should have the sensitivity not to say such mean things, however true, in front of the entire class. So Nanny Piggins snuck across the room and emptied a jar of cockroaches into Mrs Anderson’s handbag.

  The children were right in their prediction, the food was inedible chicken. Fortunately Nanny Piggins had brought a large chocolate cake in her handbag so she and Boris did not have to eat the overcooked chicken kiev. Instead they used the rubbery meat as cushions because the chairs in the hall were of that unusually hard and uncomfortable plastic variety that schools always seem to prefer.

  Nanny Piggins and Boris whiled away the time trying to pick out the most bored parent. Nanny Piggins saw a man who looked like he was about to slip into a coma. But Boris had the advantage of being taller, and he spotted a woman down the back of the hall who had actually fallen asleep, her cheek slumped in her coleslaw.

  Finally the plates were cleared away and dessert was brought out. Samantha placed two plates of wafer-thin brown stuff in front of Nanny Piggins and Boris.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

  Samantha hesitated, then, in an ashamed voice, admitted, ‘Chocolate cake.’

  ‘It is?’ asked Boris. ‘How can you tell? There’s so little of it.’

  ‘Why is it such an atomically small portion? I practically need an electron microscope to see what I’m eating. They’re not trying to make us lose weight, are they?’ demanded Nanny Piggins. ‘Because if they are I will leave right now!’

  ‘No, they are small portions because Headmaster Pimplestock is incredibly cheap,’ said Samantha, blushing, because it always embarrassed her to be critical, even when she was being strictly accurate. ‘He bought just one chocolate cake to feed three hundred parents.’

  ‘He did what!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘We should call the police!’

  ‘That’s just wrong,’ agreed Boris.