by R. A. Spratt
“All right, let’s do it. Let’s impress that critic,” decided Nanny Piggins.
“How?” asked Samantha.
“Well, everything already looks fabulous. And I don’t think I could do anything to improve the breakfasts, short of inventing a new element for the periodic table and calling it chocolatonium,” said Nanny Piggins. “Really there is only one blemish on Nanny Piggins’s B & B.”
“What is it?” asked the children.
Michael quickly tried to rub off the chocolate smear behind his ear in case that was the blemish she was referring to. But it was not.
“Your father,” said Nanny Piggins. “I think we will have to hide him.”
“You could put a lampshade on his head,” suggested Boris.
“That works when you do it because you are a ballet dancer, so you can make your body look like a lamp stand,” said Nanny Piggins. “But I doubt Mr. Green has the same ability.”
“You could lock him in the broom closet,” suggested Derrick.
“Hmm, locking people in closets is very heavily frowned on by social services,” said Nanny Piggins.
“It’s just a shame that technically this is Father’s house,” said Michael.
“I know. Never mind, we’ll just have to hope for the best,” decided Nanny Piggins. “If the critic does meet your father, I can always explain that I hired him as a bellboy as part of a program to help keep lunatics off the streets.”
The next morning, Nanny Piggins and the children stood in the front hallway waiting for the arrival of the critic.
“How will we know who he is when he arrives?” asked Michael.
“Hopefully he’ll tell us,” said Nanny Piggins. “Otherwise we’ll just have to search all the guests’ luggage until we find him.”
But they need not have worried. It became immediately apparent who Wolfgang Van Der Porten was as soon as he got out of his limousine. Nanny Piggins had never seen a man hold his nose so high in the air without the aid of standing on stilts. He did not greet his welcoming party, even though Nanny Piggins stepped forward and held out her trotter. He merely shrugged his coat off his shoulders (so it fell to the floor, the first bad mark for Nanny Piggins’s B & B—no one had leaped forward to catch it), took out a little notepad, and started scribbling down criticisms.
“I see your entrance has a floor and a ceiling. How predictable,” the critic said dismissively before sailing into the living room. “An indoor tent! How last autumn of you.”
“Would you like some chocolate?” offered Nanny Piggins, rushing forward with a plate of Nanny Piggins’s Special Breakfast Chocolate (the most welcoming gesture she knew).
“Yuck! I can’t stand the stuff,” said the critic, turning his nose up even higher. “Chocolate rots your teeth, clouds the mind, and clogs the bowels. Take it away.”
Nanny Piggins did not take the chocolate away. She ate it to get over the shock of meeting someone who did not like chocolate.
“I don’t think he’s going to like your breakfast, then,” whispered Michael.
The critic continued to wander about the house writing down more criticisms—“vertical walls—what a cliché,” “faucets you have to turn on with your hands—how rustic,” and “no gym, but a twenty-four-hour all-you-can-eat cake buffet—so unhealthy.”
“What a simply dreadful man,” muttered Nanny Piggins. “He could get a job in the circus. People would pay to come and stare at him. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so horrible. Except of course your—”
At that exact moment Mr. Green entered the room, spotted the critic, and immediately started groveling. “Ah, cousin, so good to see you!”
“Cousin? What a peculiar greeting,” said the critic.
“We’re all family here,” said Mr. Green, bowing so low his nose actually touched the carpet. “Is there anything I can do for you? Rub your feet? Hand-wash your underwear? Run into town to fetch you anything, anything at all?”
“Really? Anything, you say? Well, what if I said I wanted a sack full of lead ball bearings?” asked the critic.
“Right away,” said Mr. Green, after which he dashed out of the house.
“Just as I thought. Staff making promises they can’t fulfill,” criticized the critic as he continued to scrawl in his notepad.
But half an hour later, the critic was astonished to see Mr. Green sweating his way back up the street carrying a heavy sack full of lead.
“Extraordinary,” exclaimed the critic.
“Anything for a rich… I mean, a dear cousin,” panted Mr. Green.
“This is some kind of stunt, isn’t it?” said the critic. “Well, we’ll just see how servile your service really is. Do five hundred jumping jacks.”
“Of course,” agreed Mr. Green as he launched into the horrible exercise. By the time he finished, Mr. Green had gone purple in the face, but he continued to smile at the man he thought was his rich cousin. The critic just stared at him. In his thirty years of reviewing hotels, he had never met anyone so obsequiously obedient.
Nanny Piggins and the children watched in enthralled wonder, waiting to see what the critic would make Mr. Green do next.
“Fetch me a garden salad,” demanded the critic.
“Er… right away,” said Mr. Green, disappearing into the kitchen.
“This ought to be good,” said Nanny Piggins. “I bet your father has no idea what a garden salad is.” Nanny Piggins did not know herself, but she was sure a meal that contained the words garden and salad could not be good.
Mr. Green rushed back a few moments later with a large bowl of grass clippings. Nanny Piggins had been right. Mr. Green knew nothing about preparing any type of meal, so he had simply run out into the garden and grabbed a handful of the first green thing he saw. Luckily for Mr. Green, however, a pure grass garden salad was all the rage in Paris that week, so the critic could not have been more impressed.
“Well, Nanny Piggins, your decor is hideous, the pervasive stench of chocolate throughout every room is nauseating, and I am pretty sure I saw a ten-foot-tall bear roaming about in the garden. But I have to say, this member of your staff is so utterly grovelingly obliging—I love it. I am going to give your B & B five stars,” declared the critic.
“Hooray!” cheered Nanny Piggins and the children.
“Thanks to the Maxwellian Guide, your B & B will soon be filled with the richest, most exclusive international travelers,” said the critic. “People just like me.”
“What?” said Nanny Piggins.
“I shall ensure that all my friends and colleagues, all the people who share my attitudes and values, will visit here,” explained the critic.
It took Nanny Piggins exactly two minutes and seven seconds to throw the critic out (she dragged him to the front door by his ear and pushed him down the front steps), politely ask the remaining dentists to leave, return the parachutes to the retired colonel around the corner, and close down her B & B forever.
“That was a near miss,” said Nanny Piggins as she, Boris, and the children sat around the kitchen table eating chocolate to recover from their ordeal. “Money is lovely. And the chocolate you can buy with money is even lovelier. But it is not worth sacrificing your principles. And I make it a point of principle to never let anyone even more unbearable than your father stay in this house.”
The children would have voiced their agreement if their mouths had not been so very full of Nanny Piggins’s Special Breakfast Chocolate.
CHAPTER FOUR
Nanny Piggins Treads the Boards
ow was school today?” asked Nanny Piggins as Derrick, Samantha, and Michael got off the bus.
“Excellent!” exclaimed Michael. “Suzanne Foo brought in a big black spider and it ran up the librarian’s leg.”
“Really? She must have trained it well.” Nanny Piggins approved.
“And gym was canceled because it rained!” said Samantha delightedly.
“What luck!” agreed Nanny Piggins. “What about you, De
rrick? Did you have a good day?”
“All right, I suppose,” said Derrick, “except Mr. Sriskandaraja caught me duct-taping Barry Nichols’s leg to a table. Now as punishment I’ve got to write a one-thousand-word essay on the great Italian explorer Marco Polo.”
“But that’s wonderful news!” exclaimed Nanny Piggins.
“It is?” asked Derrick.
“Of course. Although it does mean you’ll all have to take tomorrow off school,” Nanny Piggins added.
“It does?” asked all three Green children.
“Absolutely, because Derrick will need to do research,” explained Nanny Piggins. “And if he is going to research Marco Polo, he should obviously start by going down to the public swimming pool and playing the game Marco Polo. Because, as I’m sure all scholars would agree, while discovering China and introducing pasta to Europe were important, the invention of the game Marco Polo was by far his greatest achievement.”
And so the next day, Nanny Piggins left a message on Headmaster Pimplestock’s answering machine explaining that Derrick, Samantha, and Michael could not go to school because the World Health Organization had asked them to find a cure for hiccups. (Even though, really, Nanny Piggins already knew the cure—eat chocolate.) Then they all went to the pool.
Now, being blindfolded and chasing your friends while you scream “Marco!” and they scream “Polo!” is a lovely way to enjoy a backyard pool. But it is ten times more fun in a fifty-meter, eight-lane public pool. Especially once Nanny Piggins had persuaded all the people swimming up and down in the lanes to stop what they were doing and join the game. (It did not take much persuading—people swimming up and down in lanes are never having a wonderful time.)
Pretty soon there were forty-one adults of varying ages, as well as a pig (Nanny Piggins), a ten-foot-tall bear (Boris), and the three Green children playing the best and most raucous game of Marco Polo ever. The lifeguard tried to put a stop to it, even though they were not breaking any rules, because lifeguards instinctively feel they have to put a stop to anything noisy or fun. But Nanny Piggins offered him a slice of cake (a bit damp from falling in the pool), complimented him on his whistle, and flirted with him until the lifeguard was so charmed he was soon begging to be Marco in the next round.
Four hours later, after they were finally thrown out of the pool when the manager came out of his office and burst into tears upon seeing a giant bear demonstrating water aerobics,1 Nanny Piggins, Boris, and the children were feeling very exhilarated as they walked home eating ice-cream cones. That was until the most dreadful and unexpected thing happened.
They bumped into Mr. Green, literally.
One moment they were all walking along watching a particularly exciting helicopter fly overhead, and the next moment they heard a thump, then a thud, then an oomph. And when they looked down they saw Mr. Green sprawled on the sidewalk having walked straight into, and bounced straight off of, Boris. Boris immediately hid behind a telephone pole so he could remain incognito. But Nanny Piggins and the children peered down at Mr. Green, wondering what he was doing walking along a street in broad daylight.
Mr. Green normally went to the office before sunup and came home very late at night. (In fact, his avoidance of daylight was so complete that Nanny Piggins had been convinced he was a vampire for the first three months she had known him. The only thing that finally persuaded her that Mr. Green was not a vampire was that he was too boring to be a bloodsucking creature of the night.)
“What are you doing here?” demanded Nanny Piggins.
“I might ask the same of you,” said Mr. Green, picking himself up, dusting himself off, and checking over his shoulder to make sure nobody could see him talking to a pig. “Shouldn’t the children be in school?”
“They were given the day off because all the teachers had toothaches,” fabricated Nanny Piggins.
“Really?” asked Mr. Green.
“Oh yes, teachers are forever secretly gobbling lollipops under their desks. That is why they have such terrible tempers—too much sugar in their diet,” said Nanny Piggins. She did not believe for a moment that it was possible for anyone to have too much sugar in their diet, but she rightly guessed that Mr. Green would not be listening to her.
“I’ll be on my way, then,” said Mr. Green.
“Where?” asked Nanny Piggins, as she stepped in front of Mr. Green to block his path.
“It’s none of your business where I’m going,” said Mr. Green gruffly, which really was a very silly thing to say, because nothing makes a person more intrigued than being told that something is not their business.
“You really shouldn’t have said that,” said Samantha with a sigh as she noted a gleam appearing in her nanny’s eye.
“Just tell Nanny Piggins what you’re doing, Father,” suggested Michael. “You know it will be a lot easier in the long run.”
But whatever Mr. Green was up to was clearly embarrassing because his face turned red, he looked furtively over his shoulder, then he blustered, “If you’ll be so kind… just go home… that is an order.” And with this he flipped up his collar to hide his face and scurried away.
“What do you think he’s up to?” asked Derrick.
“Perhaps he’s fallen in with criminals,” suggested Michael hopefully.
“Or he’s been fired from his job for being boring,” suggested Samantha realistically.
“Or he’s rushing down to the pool having heard that there was a really excellent game of Marco Polo going on there,” suggested Boris.
“Or all three! He’s probably been fired for falling in with criminals who want to play Marco Polo,” said Nanny Piggins as she watched Mr. Green scurry away in the distance. “We should follow him just to find out for sure.”
“Wouldn’t that be an invasion of Father’s privacy?” asked Derrick.
“Oh yes,” said Nanny Piggins, “but fathers shouldn’t have privacy. It’s part of being a normal parent to have no personal time, property, or space. Come on, let’s follow him.”
The children did not need to be persuaded. They were burning with curiosity. And it seemed silly to go to school now when half the day was already over. So they all took off running after Mr. Green before he disappeared into the distance.
Fortunately Mr. Green was not an observant man, so he did not notice he was being followed by his own children, their nanny, and a giant dancing bear. Plus Nanny Piggins was very good at “tailing a perp” (which is police talk for following a criminal), having read so many detective novels. She knew the trick was that as soon as the person you are following starts to turn around, you have to freeze in the middle of what you are doing and pretend to be a lost foreign tourist by having a loud conversation about street signs in German. This ruse worked well. So Nanny Piggins, Boris, and the children were only a few yards behind Mr. Green when they saw him disappear through the side door of the most disreputable type of building imaginable—a theater.
“A theater!” exclaimed Nanny Piggins. “What on earth could he be doing in there?”
“Buying theater tickets?” suggested Samantha.
“When have you ever known your father to voluntarily spend money on something pleasurable?” asked Nanny Piggins.
“True,” conceded Samantha.
Just then, something caught Michael’s eye. “Hey, look at that sign!”
They all looked up at a sign stuck to the back of the stage door:
OPEN AUDITION FOR
THE AMATEUR THEATER SOCIETY’S PRODUCTION OF
SHAKESPEARE’S HAMLET
ALL WELCOME
Nanny Piggins, Boris, and the children were shocked. Nanny Piggins even considered fainting, but then thought better of it, because the sidewalk did not look clean, and she was wearing an especially lovely outfit.
“Your father is auditioning for a play!” exclaimed Nanny Piggins.
“And he’s taking time off work to do it!” marveled Derrick.
“Remind me that when he comes home, I
need to bite his leg,” said Nanny Piggins.
“Why?” asked Samantha.
“This is so out of character, I had better check that he’s not been kidnapped and replaced with a robot clone,” explained Nanny Piggins.
“What are we going to do?” asked Michael. “Father obviously doesn’t want us here.”
“You’re right. Which is why we must go in and watch. If your father is going to embarrass himself, it is important there are a lot of witnesses,” said Nanny Piggins. “Humiliation doesn’t really count unless there are lots of people to constantly remind you about it for years and years to come.”
So Nanny Piggins, Boris, and the children let themselves into the theater and found seats up toward the back in the dark where they could watch the auditions. It soon became apparent why Mr. Green was auditioning. The director of the production and president of the Amateur Theater Society was a very attractive widow named Mrs. Fortescue-Brown, and Mr. Green was clearly smitten with her.
“A funny thing happened this morning at the office, Mrs. Fortescue-Brown,” began Mr. Green, smirking and trying to look handsome. “I asked my clerk to fetch me volume thirteen of the taxation code, and he brought me volume seven, because he can’t read roman numerals! Ha. Ha-ha.” Mr. Green had to laugh at the end of his own joke because nobody else did, because it was not really a joke. (Mistaking sentences for jokes is a very common mistake made by aspiring comedians.)
“That’s lovely, Mr. Green,” said Mrs. Fortescue-Brown. “Now be a dear and sit over there until it is your turn to try out.”
Nanny Piggins was right about the auditions being enormously entertaining. This was partly because she had hot-wired the popcorn machine and they were having a lovely time throwing popcorn at Boris and watching him leap up and pirouette in midair before catching them in his mouth. And partly because all the people auditioning were so awful.
Some were so shy they spoke in a whisper and could not be heard. Some were so bold they yelled every line. And not one of them could act. There is a real trick to saying every word as though you have absolutely no idea what it means, and every one of these amateurs had exactly that knack. As a professional circus performer, Nanny Piggins never realized that some people could be so bad at dazzling a crowd.
