by R. A. Spratt
‘Why didn’t you say so?’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘That can easily be arranged. The man who runs the zoo is a dear friend of mine.’
‘And he owes you a favour,’ added Boris.
‘Yes,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘I haven’t released any of the large cats for nearly six months now, and I’m sure he’s tremendously grateful.’
‘Well, as long as the parrot is locked up,’ said the mayor, ‘I suppose that will do.’
Unfortunately for the mayor, he had forgotten how much the man who ran the zoo disliked him. The mayor had slashed the zoo’s budget the previous year, forcing the zookeepers to feed the lions budget mince instead of porterhouse steak, which, frankly, they did not enjoy at all. And it is not much fun looking after a grumpy lion. So when Percy came to live in his aviary (a huge walk-through tent where Percy could make lots of friends), the zoo manager was very open to Nanny Piggins’ fund-raising suggestions. Percy was allowed to continue his radio show from inside the aviary. This was a tremendous drawcard for the zoo. People liked watching him humiliate the mayor even more than they enjoyed watching the seal jump through hoops.
But Nanny Piggins decided to retire from the show, allowing ‘The Percy & Piggins Show’ to become ‘Percy and the Zoo Crew’.
‘Are you sure you want to quit?’ asked Samantha.
‘I thought you enjoyed being on the radio,’ said Michael.
‘It’s true, I do like telling a broad audience what I think,’ agreed Nanny Piggins, ‘but I don’t think I’d like to go to work every day in an aviary. Birds are lovely to have as friends, and as you know, I’m not averse to risk. But when you wear such fantastic designer outfits as I do on a daily basis, the last thing you want is bird poo raining down on your head.’
The children nodded at the wisdom of this statement.
‘Now that everything has returned to normal, let’s go home and have a slice of cake,’ suggested Nanny Piggins.
Usually the story would end here, but there was one more extraordinary twist that lay ahead. Later that day, when they got back to the house, Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children were shocked to discover a note from Mr Green, lying in the middle of the kitchen table.
‘What can this mean?’ wondered Nanny Piggins. ‘Your father has never left us a note before. He usually prefers to yell at us in person.’
‘You’d better read it,’ said Derrick.
Nanny Piggins tore open the envelope and began reading aloud.
Dear Nanny Piggins,
I have been transferred, effective immediately, to the firm’s Vanuatu office. I shall be leaving you in charge of the house and children. I am an important senior tax lawyer now. I cannot be distracted from my work by anything as trivial as my own children. I expect you to contact me as little as possible.
Your Employer,
Mr Green
As Nanny Piggins finished reading, tears welled in her eyes.
‘Nanny Piggins, what’s wrong?’ asked Derrick.
‘You’re not upset because Father’s note is so rude and insensitive, are you?’ asked Samantha.
‘Not at all,’ said Nanny Piggins, wiping away her tears. ‘They are tears of joy. We’re going to have so much fun now that he’s gone.’
Nanny Piggins and the children were sitting at the breakfast table and for once Boris was sitting with them, which was making him uncomfortable. He was so used to hiding outside in the bushes and sharing his honey croissants with the ants, that to actually have to sit on a chair and use a napkin was cramping his style. No more shoving the food in his mouth and leaving it for the insects to get his fur clean for him.
The reason Boris was sitting at the table was not because Mr Green was being even more unobservant than usual, but because Mr Green was not there. He had gone to take up his new important job in a distant country and the house positively glowed with the warmth of his absence.
‘What a glorious day, children,’ said Nanny Piggins, failing to hide the delight at their father’s departure. ‘If I had known what sheer unbridled joy it would be to have your father leave the country forever I would have arranged to have him deported ages ago.’
‘How could you have him deported? He’s not a foreign citizen,’ asked Derrick.
‘Foreign passports are the easiest thing in the world to forge,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘They do it all the time in movies. I learnt how to copy passports from watching The Great Escape. It was a very good movie. It also taught me how to jump a motorcycle over a barbed wire fence and how to vault a pommel horse.’
‘So what are we going to do with our new-found freedom?’ asked Michael.
‘Well the first question is – what are we going to do with Mr Green’s bedroom?’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘But won’t he be coming back,’ asked Samantha, ‘for meetings and holidays?’
‘If you ran a law firm, would you want your father to attend meetings?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘No,’ admitted Samantha. She knew the law firm had always preferred for Mr Green to stay inside his basement office.
‘And I seriously doubt that your father will start celebrating holidays,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I think he’s allergic to joy. It might send him into anaphylactic shock.’
‘So we’re never going to see him again?’ asked Michael.
‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high,’ warned Nanny Piggins, ‘but if he did come back for a few days, or even a few months, he wouldn’t need an actual room. He could just stay in a tent on the front lawn.’
‘A tent?’ asked Samantha.
‘I lived in a tent for years,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘and it never did me any harm.’
‘You hated it,’ Michael reminded his nanny. ‘That’s why you ran away from the circus.’
‘But only because there was never anywhere to hang up my frocks,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘and there was no hot water for my bath. Your father doesn’t have frocks and he doesn’t bathe anywhere near as often as he should, so he won’t be troubled by that.’
‘Why don’t we turn Father’s bedroom into Boris’ bedroom?’ said Michael. He liked the idea of having his dear friend close at hand in the middle of the night, when he wanted company for a midnight snack in the kitchen.
‘Oh no, no, no,’ said Boris, becoming truly alarmed. ‘It’s one thing to sit at the table during breakfast, but I couldn’t sleep in the house through the whole night as well.’
‘Why not?’ asked Samantha. ‘Do you like your shed that much?’
‘I’m a grown bear. I like to have a place of my own,’ explained Boris. ‘Besides, it’s handy having a bedroom full of garden tools. The rake is excellent for scratching my back. And the trowel is good at getting honeycomb out of my teeth.’
‘We could use Father’s room to store chocolate,’ suggested Derrick.
‘Hmm,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘That’s a good idea in theory. But in practice I think buying a roomful of chocolate would only lead to my eating a roomful of chocolate. Which is very nice to do occasionally but it would be exhausting if I had to do it several times a day.’
‘Did you have anything in mind for Father’s room?’ asked Michael.
‘Well, actually,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘I did have one small idea. You may have noticed that Mr Mahmood is having an extension put on his house. And I happen to know for a fact that he is expecting a concrete truck this morning to pour five metric tonnes of concrete into a hole in his backyard.’
‘Yes,’ said the children, wondering where this could possibly be going.
‘So I was thinking,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘I’m sure the truck driver would have a tonne or two of concrete to spare. And I’m sure I could persuade him to give it to us in exchange for a slice of my chocolate fondue cake.’ (A chocolate cake dipped in hot molten chocolate.)
‘But what would you do with two tonnes of concrete?’ asked Samantha.
‘Pour it on your Father’s bedroom floor, of course,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Then get us all ro
llerskates and turn his bedroom into a roller disco!’
‘That’s a wonderful idea!’ exclaimed Boris. ‘I love rollerskating.’
‘But what about all the furniture in Father’s room?’ asked Samantha.
‘We could give it to charity,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘although it seems awfully cruel to the poor people to give them such ugly furniture. No, I think it would be much kinder to make the poor people a cake and burn the furniture.’
‘Are you sure we’d get away with it?’ worried Samantha.
‘What’s to stop us?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘With your father gone, now we can do anything!’
At that moment, the telephone rang.
‘Who could be calling at this hour?’ asked Derrick.
‘Perhaps someone has heard we’re having a roller disco and they want to come,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘You only thought up the roller disco two seconds ago,’ said Michael.
‘But it’s such a good idea,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I’m sure it must have occurred to other people that it is the only reasonable thing we could do with your father’s empty bedroom.’
BRING BRING.
‘Perhaps we should answer the phone,’ suggested Derrick.
Nanny Piggins sighed. ‘I suppose so, but unless it is a rich chocolate philanthropist who wants to give me a huge bar of chocolate for no good reason, I can’t talk to them. I have too much work to do this morning. I’ve got workmen to bribe and rollerskates to oil.’
Michael left the room to answer the phone. He came running back a few seconds later.
‘Do they want to know a convenient time when we will be home for the chocolate delivery?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
‘It’s not a chocolate delivery man,’ said Michael.
‘Oh, how disappointing,’ said Nanny Piggins.
‘It’s Father,’ said Michael.
‘Oh dear,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘And everything had been going so well this morning.’
‘He wants to talk to you,’ said Michael.
‘Why?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘He never wanted to talk to me when he lived here.’
‘He’s very adamant,’ said Michael. ‘He doesn’t sound happy.’
‘Your father never sounds happy,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘except that time he cut his finger on the potato peeler and thought he was going to make a fortune from suing the potato peeler company.’
‘Can you come and talk to him?’ asked Michael. ‘I don’t mind when he yells at me over the phone, but he’s just started sobbing and that’s so depressing.’
‘All right,’ agreed Nanny Piggins.
She went out into the hall to speak on the phone and the others followed her to listen to her side of the conversation.
‘Yes, what is it?’ she began. ‘Hmm . . . A-huh . . . Oh dear . . . Yes, I understand . . . Yes, I understand . . . Yes, I understand.’
Unfortunately the children could not understand because this one-sided conversation was too cryptic for them. (And Boris was not trying to understand because he was busily licking the insides of a jar of honey.)
‘Now, Mr Green,’ said Nanny Piggins, using her firm voice. ‘I want you to stop crying. Stop crying . . . I’m not going to talk to you until you stop crying . . . That’s better. Now I know it’s hard to start a new job. Have you tried making friends? . . . You smile at people and say, “Will you be my friend?” . . . All right . . . Okay . . . I’ll be there as soon as possible.’
Nanny Piggins hung up the phone.
‘What’s happening?’ asked Samantha.
‘Apparently your father is not enjoying his new job,’ explained Nanny Piggins.
‘But he never enjoys anything,’ said Samantha.
‘I pointed that out,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘but he says in this job, they are actually torturing him and forcing him to work in inhumane conditions.’
‘Really?’ asked Derrick.
‘That’s what he says,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘He has begged me to come and rescue him.’
‘Are you going to do it?’ asked Michael.
‘Well my instinct was to say “No”,’ admitted Nanny Piggins, ‘but when I was in my hour of need, having run away from the circus one rainy night, with nowhere to go, and no umbrella to hold over the lovely suede shoes I was wearing, it was your father who took me in.’
‘But not because he was nice,’ said Michael. ‘Because you agreed to work for him for ten cents an hour.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘now that it’s his hour of need I can’t abandon him. If he wants to be rescued, then rescued he shall be.’
‘Awww,’ said the children, ‘but what about the roller disco?’
Nanny Piggins looked at her watch. ‘Well, I said I’d rescue him but I didn’t say I’d rescue him straight-away. I’m sure we can squeeze in some major house renovations and a roller disco party first.’
And so after a few short hours of pouring concrete, installing a disco ball, burning Mr Green’s furniture and dancing on rollerskates, Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children set out for the airport.
Fortunately they did not have to wait long for a flight. Nanny Piggins managed to convince a charter flight load of tourists heading to Marrakesh that Vanuatu was in fact a much nicer place to go. Then once the flight plan was resubmitted, Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children hitched a lift with them.
They had a wonderful time on the flight. It was an old plane and the in-flight entertainment system failed thirty minutes into the journey. So Nanny Piggins and Boris leapt up and acted out the rest of the movie for all the passengers’ entertainment. Nanny Piggins had never seen Gandhi before, but she had no problem improvising the rest of the storyline. In fact her version had a much happier ending than the real movie because in her story it ended with Gandhi getting married to a princess and opening a thousand chocolate factories across India so no-one would ever go hungry again.
When they landed in Port Vila, Derrick consulted a map to work out where they could find their father’s office. He’d just found the street address when Nanny Piggins came running over.
‘Quick!’ she called urgently. ‘Come with me!’
‘You’ve found Father already?’ asked Michael.
‘Something much, much more important,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘There’s no time to explain. You have to come with me now!’
The children grabbed their bags and ran with their nanny across the tarmac of the airport.
‘Where are we running to?’ asked Michael. He disliked random running, whereas running after an ice-cream van or to a sweet shop was always worth the effort.
‘We have to catch this plane,’ said Nanny Piggins.
They rounded a hangar to see a small propeller plane.
‘We’re catching another plane?’ asked Samantha.
‘Why?’ asked Derrick. ‘Father’s office is just a few kilometres into town.’
‘Something urgent has come up. We have to make a diversion,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Quick, get in.’
The children and Boris got into the plane.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Derrick.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Michael.
‘More importantly,’ said Samantha, who had noticed something much more crucial, ‘where’s the pilot?’
‘I’m the pilot,’ said Nanny Piggins as she jumped into the front seat and turned on the engine.
‘I want to stay here,’ wailed Samantha as she lunged for the cabin door.
‘Pish,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘You’ve flown with me in a space shuttle. A little six-seater plane is much less complicated.’
‘But a little six-seater plane flies much closer to the ground and mountains and other things we could crash into,’ said Samantha between breaths as she started to hyperventilate.
‘Do you have permission to use this plane?’ asked Derrick as they rolled out onto the runway.
‘Of course. I gave the owner a slice of chocolate cake I had in my handbag,’
said Nanny Piggins, ‘and I promised to give him another slice just as delicious when I return the plane undamaged.’
‘What if you return the plane damaged?’ asked Michael, knowing his nanny and thinking this was the more realistic scenario.
‘Then I promised to give him two slices,’ said Nanny Piggins.
The plane was now shuddering down the runway, gaining speed.
‘But what about Father?’ asked Derrick. ‘He’s here in Port Vila. You promised to rescue him.’
‘I know,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘and I never break a promise, especially one to myself about eating more cake. So I’m not going to break my promise to your father. But I didn’t say when I was going to rescue him. And something much more important has come up.’
‘What?’ asked the children.
‘The yam harvest,’ said Nanny Piggins as she wrenched on the joystick and the plane swooped up into the air.
The sudden acceleration skyward made all the children and Boris feel like their stomachs had been left on the ground, so they spent the next few minutes searching the plane for sick bags, then struggling not to use them.
After that they could not ask Nanny Piggins any more questions because she was too busy talking to the control tower, specifically dictating her treacle tart recipe to placate them. The air traffic controller had been extremely cross that Nanny Piggins forgot to ask for permission to take-off. He only got to give instructions to half a dozen flights per day so he did not like to miss one.
‘Why do you think Nanny Piggins is flying us somewhere for the yam harvest?’ asked Derrick.
‘Perhaps she’s got some marshmallows she wants to use up,’ said Boris. ‘Yams are delicious when they’re baked with marshmallows and a little honey.’
‘Or perhaps she’s gone totally crazy and she’s going to fly out over the Pacific Ocean until we run out of fuel,’ said Michael.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Boris. ‘There aren’t any cake shops in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Even if she were to go bonkers, Nanny Piggins would never stray too far from a good cake shop.’