Nanny Piggins and the Runaway Lion

by R. A. Spratt

  Inside, Nanny Piggins had not discovered the mountains of free chocolate described in her letter. There was just a group of old ladies studying Ancient Greek as part of the council’s Leisure Learning program. Even after Nanny Piggins had shaken the Ancient Greek instructor by the collar for a full five minutes, she had not been able to uncover the location of the free chocolate. So she came home a very sad pig.

  But as she turned the corner onto the Greens’ street, she was soon jolted out of her dejection by the most shocking sight. There, on the sidewalk, stood Mr. Green with a very large woman (who, if not for the dress, could easily have been mistaken for a rugby player) and three trunks. And alongside them was parked a school bus. But not the children’s regular school bus. This bus was a regal purple and had the words DAMPWORTHINGTON’S BOARDING SCHOOL painted on the side. But most significantly of all, Nanny Piggins could see, beating on the Plexiglas rear window, the fists of Derrick, Samantha, and Michael as they called out to their beloved nanny, “Nanny Piggins! Help us, please!”

  Nanny Piggins dropped her trunk, suitcase, and Tupperware and ran toward them. “What are you doing with the children?” demanded Nanny Piggins.

  “Just sending them to school,” said Mr. Green smugly.

  “Yes, but which school?” asked Nanny Piggins.

  “I have been fortunate enough to win three scholarships to an exclusive boarding school,” said Mr. Green. (He was very proud of himself. Mr. Green had won the B. J. Silverman Scholarship. It was awarded to the employee at his law firm who used the least amount of stationery five years in a row. Mr. Green had been trying to win this scholarship since Derrick was born, but it was only in the last five years that he had devised his brilliant strategy. At night, after all the normal people in the office went home, Mr. Green went around taking stationery off other people’s desks and putting it back in the cabinet. So the stationery tally actually had him in credit, having put back one thousand eighty-six more packets of Post-It notes than he took out.)

  “Boarding school? How could you?” asked Nanny Piggins, bewildered that a father could be so heartless.

  “At boarding school, they will have all their needs taken care of,” said Mr. Green, “and by proper staff. Not pigs.”

  Nanny Piggins gasped. “That’s the real reason, isn’t it? You’re sending your children away just because you don’t want me—the world’s most glamorous flying pig—living in your house!”

  “I don’t have to answer your questions anymore,” pouted Mr. Green. “You’re fired.”

  “What?” demanded Nanny Piggins. She had been fired out of a cannon many, many times. But she had never been fired from a job before.

  “Fired!” said Mr. Green with finality.

  Fortunately the words Nanny Piggins now yelled at Mr. Green were drowned out by the sound of Derrick, Samantha, and Michael pummeling their fists on the bus window, so I will not have to repeat them here in print. Suffice it to say that Nanny Piggins let Mr. Green have a piece of her mind using the type of colorful language you can only pick up from years of working in a traveling circus.

  “That’s enough of that, then,” said the large woman, clapping her hands for silence. “As headmistress of Dampworthington’s Boarding School, I won’t stand for any shilly-shallying, dilly-dallying, or flibberty-jibbeting. You are not the legal guardian of these children; Mr. Green is, and he has signed them over to me. And I refuse to have any dealings with you. Bruno, our bus driver, has packed your belongings.”

  Nanny Piggins looked around to see all her things strewn across the Greens’ front garden. Someone had obviously thrown them out her bedroom window.

  “I suggest you pick them up and go back to the sty you came from,” said the headmistress before she turned away and got on the bus herself.

  Mr. Green smirked a gloating smile. “Did you enjoy your free chocolate?”

  Nanny Piggins gasped. “The mayor didn’t write that letter at all! You did!” she accused. “It’s bad enough to send your children away to endure years of certain misery. But forging a letter that falsely claims the presence of free chocolate! Can you sink any lower?!”

  Nanny Piggins was now so angry that Mr. Green became scared. He ran back into the house and locked the new locks (which he had had installed while she was down at Town Hall).

  The engine of the bus started up.

  “Nanny Piggins?” pleaded the Green children, their faces and hands pressed against the bus window.

  “Can’t you do something?” asked Derrick, his voice pitifully muffled by the thick glass.

  “I’m afraid your father is your legal guardian,” said Nanny Piggins, “and unlike the time he tried to sell you as apprentice sumo wrestlers, sending you to boarding school is technically allowed under the law.”

  Nanny Piggins reached up with her trotter (which was not easy because she was only four feet tall) and touched each of the children’s faces (or rather the places on the bus window the children’s faces were pressed against). Nanny Piggins was glad Boris was not there to see this pitiful sight. He would be distraught enough when he heard about it.

  As the bus pulled away and she watched the children’s faces disappear into the distance, Nanny Piggins wondered if she had Russian blood herself, because she was weeping harder than she had ever wept before. She could not believe it. After all they had been through together, it had come to this. She was never going to see the children again. And she had not even been allowed to give them a hug good-bye.

  As they pulled in through the wrought-iron gates, Derrick, Samantha, and Michael were soon to discover that Dampworthington’s Boarding School was ten times more awful than they had imagined it would be. And they imagined something pretty bad because they had read a lot of novels about poor orphans being sent to horrible cheap boarding schools and catching terrible respiratory illnesses.

  The boarding school was miles and miles away from anything, out in the middle of the country, presumably to discourage anyone except children with advanced wilderness skills from running away. The building was cold and bleak. The founder of the school had specifically set down in the school’s constitution that no heating system was ever to be installed because he believed a child’s brain worked best at thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Unfortunately, while the brain may flourish at that temperature, the little fingers, toes, and noses of small children do not. As a result, the entire student body spent nine months of the year huddling. The other three months of the year they sweltered because the founder also believed that fresh air was too much of a distraction, so he had all of the windows nailed shut.

  The teachers were unspeakably horrible. We all know what teachers are like at an ordinary school. But imagine the type of teacher who can only get a job at an unheated boarding school in the middle of nowhere. They were not happy, well-adjusted souls. And as one selfish misery guts once famously said, “A problem shared is a problem halved.” And the teachers at Dampworthington’s believed in this theory wholeheartedly. They spent all day every day halving their own misery by inflicting the other half on the young charges in their care.

  Things did not start well for Derrick, Samantha, and Michael. Headmistress Butterstrode (for that was the large woman’s name) marched them off the bus, forced them to put on horrible uniforms, and then made them line up in the lobby.

  “There will be no more crying,” she announced. “Self-indulgent extremes of emotion are strictly forbidden under article one hundred fifty-six of Dampworthington’s school rules. And while crying over lost pigs is not specifically covered by the rules, it is, nonetheless, pitiful and shameful, and if I catch any of you doing it again, you will be punished.”

  “How?” asked Derrick. He personally did not think he could make it through twenty-four hours without shedding a tear for Nanny Piggins, so he was curious to know what would happen.

  “Silence!” said Headmistress Butterstrode. “The asking of questions is strictly forbidden under article two hundred twelve of Dampworthin
gton’s school rules.”

  Samantha sobbed.

  “No sobbing,” said Headmistress Butterstrode. “Sobbing falls under the definition of crying, according to clarifying clause six of article one hundred fifty-six. There are one thousand three hundred and four school rules, a copy of which you will find on your pillows. And I expect you to have them all memorized by nine AM tomorrow. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Y—” began the children.

  “Shhh!” said Headmistress Butterstrode. “The answering of rhetorical questions is forbidden, under rule eight hundred and three. Do you understand?”

  The children did not want to do the wrong thing, but they did not know how to respond when asked a question and then told not to answer it. So they glanced at one another.

  “A-a-a!” scolded Headmistress Butterstrode. “Looking at one another when a teacher is talking is not allowed. Rule three.”

  The Green children, not knowing what else to do, stared straight forward with blank expressions on their faces.

  “That’s better.” Headmistress Butterstrode smiled. “Now. The student body is gathered for lunch. Follow me.”

  She pushed open a double door and led the Greens into an enormous room full of two hundred children eating in total silence. It really was extraordinary. It was one thing to see a group of two hundred children not talking, but to see them all eating without making any noise—no chewing sounds, no clinking of cutlery, no sipping of drinks. It was eerie to behold.

  Headmistress Butterstrode led Derrick, Samantha, and Michael to a platform at the head of the room. “You will now introduce yourselves to the school. You, girl, go first.” She gave Samantha a small shove in the back.

  Now, as you know, Samantha was a girl who worried a lot. And of all the things in the world she worried about, being forced to do public speaking was one of the worst. In her mind public speaking was right up there with wrestling tigers or swimming with sharks as one of the most horrifically frightening things you could possibly do.

  With Nanny Piggins’s loving encouragement, Samantha had done many daring things she never imagined herself capable of. But right at this moment, Nanny Piggins was not there, so Samantha did not feel loved nor safe. She felt awful. She had a great big lump in her throat the size of a grapefruit, and a bucket-load of tears welled up behind each eye ready to burst out. Samantha did not think she could say something as simple as “please pass the salt” without falling on the floor, wailing loudly, and beating the ground with her fists. So the idea of being forced to make an impromptu speech was horrifying.

  “What should I say?” whispered Samantha hoarsely.

  “Your name and a little bit about yourself,” said the headmistress.

  Samantha stepped forward. All the children in the hall silently put down their cutlery and turned to face her. Samantha considered running from the room, but her legs felt like jelly and she did not think she would get very far. “My name…” she croaked.

  “Louder,” said Headmistress Butterstrode.

  “My name is Samantha Green,” said Samantha, “and I…” Samantha paused. She did not know how to describe herself. She had no hobbies. She had no talents. The only thing she had in her life was the world’s most glamorous and amazing nanny who led them all on the most astounding adventures on a daily basis (which surely was more than enough for any child). But Samantha instinctively knew the headmistress would not want her to mention that. “I—” continued Samantha. Then she spat out the first thing that came into her mind—“really like chocolate.”

  Everyone in the dining room laughed.

  “No laughing!” snapped Headmistress Butterstrode. “You are all violating the strict ‘no mirth’ rule of the Dampworthington Code. As punishment, there will be no more food today.”

  The children all hung their heads and looked at the plates that they had just been forbidden to eat from. But some of them still smiled. Just the thought of chocolate had been enough to cheer them up in such a bleak place.

  The rest of the day did not go well for the Green children. Before he was allowed to attend any class, Derrick was marched off to see the school barber and forced to have a haircut. Derrick tried explaining that he just wanted a little off the sides, not realizing that the school barber was completely deaf and only capable of one type of haircut. (His main job was trimming the school hedges, and they were viciously overpruned.) Derrick emerged from the room with his head completely shaved around the sides and back, and nothing but a short spiky strip of hair along the top of his head. And he had lots of tiny pieces of toilet paper stuck to his scalp where the barber had nicked him with what Derrick was sure was a pair of pruning shears.

  Michael fared even worse. A no-food diet did not agree with him at all. When he could not indulge in his favorite hobby—eating treats under a bush in the garden—he became delirious. And in his case, delirium caused him to start telling the truth. He staggered from class to class muttering things like: “This school is simply dreadful,” “I really, really hate it here,” and “I do miss my nanny, Nanny Piggins.” So it was only a matter of time before he found out what the official school punishment was. He was marched out into the school playground, sticky-taped to the flagpole in the center of the quad, and left there in the rain.

  Derrick longed to go and rescue his brother, but he was being punished by his science teacher, who had locked him in the chemical closet for not knowing the atomic weight of Rutherfordium.

  When the children trudged to their dormitory that night they were exhausted—physically from all the punishment and emotionally from missing their nanny.

  “Should we try to run away?” asked Samantha.

  “I can’t. I don’t have the energy,” said Michael, flopping on the floor beside his bed. (Students were not allowed to sleep on their beds because that made the sheets untidy. They had to sleep on the cold floorboards next to their beds, because, according to the late Mr. Dampworthington, “shivering was good for the brain.”)

  “And I don’t know where we could run to,” added Derrick. “If we went home, Father would only force us to come back. We could run away to sea to become pirates, but I don’t know where you go to apply for a position.”

  “I can’t believe I’ve got to spend nine years here until I turn eighteen. And poor Michael will have to be here for eleven years,” said Samantha.

  “Oh, I won’t be here that long,” whimpered Michael. “I’ll probably die of starvation before the end of the week.”

  “Let’s sleep on it. Perhaps we’ll think of something in the morning,” said Derrick.

  So they all went to bed, although none of them slept (not even Michael) because the floor was uncomfortable and their thoughts of life without Nanny Piggins were more uncomfortable still.

  The next morning at breakfast, Derrick, Samantha, and Michael were feeling very dispirited as they ate their porridge (the most dispiriting of all breakfast foods) when the meal was interrupted by the main doors from the lobby swinging open. The Green children did not turn to look. They had read the school rules the night before, so they knew that to do so would violate rule 612—the strict “no looking” rule of the Dampworthington Code. But they heard Headmistress Butterstrode striding toward the stage and a lighter pair of footsteps behind her.

  “Children,” addressed Headmistress Butterstrode. “We have another new pupil.”

  The Green children along with the rest of the student body were now allowed to turn and look. Headmistress Butterstrode stepped back, and a girl wearing the Dampworthington school uniform came forward.

  “Tell everyone your name and a little bit about yourself,” ordered Headmistress Butterstrode.

  The girl stepped to the front of the stage. She was not very tall, no more than four feet. She had long fire-engine-red hair and thick black-framed glasses. But, unlike the rest of the school population, she managed to make the uniform look somehow elegant. She scanned the room and fixed her gaze on Derrick, Samantha, and Michael.
Then, amazingly, she raised her heavy glasses and winked at them.

  The Green children gasped. It was no girl! It was Nanny Piggins!

  “Good morning,” said Nanny Piggins to the entire school. “My name is Matahari Curruthers-Dingleberry, and I look forward to my time here at Dampworthington’s.”

  She then winked at the Greens again and allowed herself to be led away by Headmistress Butterstrode.

  “Nanny Piggins has come to rescue us!” whispered Derrick.

  “But how?” whispered Samantha.

  “She’ll think of something,” said Michael.

  When Derrick arrived at his French class Nanny Piggins was already sitting in the front row.

  “Bonjour, Derrick,” said Nanny Piggins with a smile.

  “Bonjour, Mademoiselle Matahari Curruthers-Dingleberry,” replied Derrick. He wanted to say, “We’ve missed you so much. How are you going to rescue us? Are we going to dig an escape tunnel? Do you know anyone who can forge passports? Do you have any chocolate?” but he could not, because Derrick was not very good at French so he did not know the words for missed, rescue, escape, tunnel, forge, or chocolate, which is a shame because they are some of the most important words to know in any language.

  Nanny Piggins, on the other hand, spoke fluent French. Indeed, her vocabulary was much more extensive than the teacher’s, because she knew the type of salty words that would make a sailor blush, and she proceeded to teach them to the whole class.

  By exactly copying Nanny Piggins’s intonation, the students were soon telling their teacher, with perfect Parisian accents, that his “hair looked like a baboon’s toothbrush” and his “breath smelled like a three-week-old Camembert cheese.”