Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan by R. A. Spratt Page A

mouthful and looked up. ‘Just because I’m marrying your father does not mean I have to speak to any of you. Once the marriage certificate is signed I don’t plan to speak to him either. Now kindly stand aside. I have to see to your father’s car.’ With that, she left.
    ‘There is nothing for it, children, we shall have to get rid of her,’ said Nanny Piggins.
    ‘But how?’ asked Derrick.
    ‘With stealth and intelligence,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Or brute force. Whichever works best.’
    So Nanny Piggins and the children set about trying to discredit their future stepmother. (Fortunately, they had plenty of opportunity because Jane spent all day locked in the garage, like a good future wife, working on Mr Green’s car.) They searched her room but found nothing incriminating. All she had was a suitcase full of lovely designer dresses, and a one-hundred-and-eight-piece spanner set, which was odd but not illegal.
    Next, Nanny Piggins tried using brute force. She told Jane there was a five-cent piece under thesofa and when Jane lay down on the floor to look for it, Nanny Piggins rolled her up in the Persian carpet, put the carpet in the wheelbarrow and had Boris wheel her down to the tip. But, sadly, it did not work. Jane always carried a pocketknife, so she was able to cut her way out of the carpet, jump up and bop Boris over the head, then walk back to the house again.
    The children even tried having her locked up. Working on the assumption that anyone who wanted to marry their father must be criminally insane, they went down to the police station and tried to have her institutionalised. But, surprisingly, there were no outstanding arrest warrants for Jane Doeadear. She had not escaped from any local mental institutions. She did not even have a criminal record.
    So the morning of the wedding arrived and the children were very sad indeed. Once the ceremony and the reception (a cup of tea out of a thermos on the courthouse steps) were over, they would have a new mother. And their nanny would be banished forever. It seemed like there was nothing they could do. Their father was whistling happily to himself in his bedroom as he put on his best grey suit. And their future stepmother was happily locked in the garage fixing their father’s car.
    ‘It’s all over,’ said Samantha.
    ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ said Derrick.
    ‘We’re going to have a stepmother,’ said Michael.
    ‘There is one last thing we can try,’ said Nanny Piggins.
    ‘What?’ asked the children.
    ‘I’m going to kick in that garage door, and bite her on the leg,’ said Nanny Piggins.
    ‘What good will that do?’ asked Samantha.
    ‘It will make me feel better,’ said Nanny Piggins.
    So the children followed Nanny Piggins through the house as she marched towards the garage. Nanny Piggins had an eighth dan black belt in Taekwondo, so it only took one spinning reverse sidekick to reduce the door to splinters. But Nanny Piggins never bit Jane on the leg, she was too busy staring in stunned silence. Because, as she and the children burst into the garage, they discovered exactly what Jane had been doing in there all that time. She had completely transformed Mr Green’s poo-brown Rolls Royce. There was now a giant number 23 painted on the side, a roll-cage built into the chassis and support beams welded into the bonnet and boot.
    ‘Leaping Lamingtons!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘You don’t love Mr Green at all! You’re only marrying him for his Rolls Royce.’
    ‘Of course,’ laughed Jane maniacally. ‘A fool like that doesn’t deserve this masterpiece of British engineering. I’ve seen the way he drives it. Always five kilometres per hour below the speed limit. Slowing down for orange lights. Braking for pedestrians. It’s practically a crime!’
    ‘So you’re going to enter it in a motor race?’ asked Nanny Piggins.
    ‘Motor racing is for wimps,’ said Jane dismissively. ‘I’m entering it in a Demolition