Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan by R. A. Spratt Read Free Book Online Page A

she still knew a thing or two about pig ballistics. ‘Fetch me a big tub of butter.’
    Fortunately they had a huge tub of butter in Mr Green’s car. Nanny Piggins kept it there for emergencies, such as suddenly coming across hot buns that urgently needed to be eaten.
    ‘Now smear it all over me,’ ordered Nanny Piggins.
    So the children and Boris set to work buttering Nanny Piggins. It took longer than you might expect because Nanny Piggins got peckish and could not resist licking it off. It was not until Michael found a two-year-old out-of-date chocolate bar down the back seat of Mr Green’s car that they were ableto distract Nanny Piggins long enough to finish buttering her up.
    ‘Are you sure this is going to work?’ asked Derrick.
    ‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Nanny Piggins. And she was right. Although it did take all her strength and an enormous amount of shoving from all three children and Boris to jam her into the barrel.
    ‘And you call yourself a flying pig,’ scoffed Eduardo.
    ‘I’ll be calling myself ‘winner’ as you eat my dust in a minute,’ said Nanny Piggins in a muffled voice from deep inside the cannon.
    And so the moment of truth arrived. Samantha was going to do the countdown while Derrick and Eduardo’s assistant (Sanchez, the Guatemalan guinea pig), stood by, ready to fire the cannons.
    ‘Five, four, three, two, one!’ said Samantha as she clamped her eyes shut because she could not bear to look.
    Bam!!! went the cannons as they fired loudly, blasting the two animals into the air. Eduardo shot cleanly out of his cannon and made a perfect parabolic arc in the sky. It was a beautiful flight. And very long. Sadly, not quite long enough to get him all the way across Dead Man’s Gorge. He was onlytwenty centimetres short of making the other side. But twenty centimetres is a long way when there is a two hundred and nineteen-foot drop below.
    ‘Aaaaaaagggghhhh!!!!!’ said Eduardo as he realised he had made a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake.
    But, as it turned out, he was lucky. Michael had complete faith in his nanny, but did not have the same amount of faith in the ninety-year-old Howitzer or the prevailing headwind she was being blasted into. So he had, unbeknownst to Nanny Piggins, snuck out in the night and put his mattress at the bottom of Dead Man’s Gorge. So rest assured, Eduardo did not plummet to his death.
    He plummeted to his wet. Because he fell all the way down, hit the mattress, bounced off and landed in the cold wintry sea. Which would be unpleasant for anyone, but was particularly unpleasant for a desert-living armadillo from Mexico who was not used to cold weather.
    Now I should tell you what happened to Nanny Piggins. Unfortunately, it is not exactly clear. It turns out (for those of you who do know about physics, you might be familiar with this) that the tighter you pack the barrel of a cannon, the further the blast goes. So if you fire a pig that only fits into a cannon with the aid of five litres of butter, three small childrenand a bear, then that pig is going to fly a very long way. Especially if that pig is not particularly good at maths, and she has particular difficulty with decimal places. So that instead of putting 0.02 kilos of gunpowder into the cannon, Nanny Piggins put twenty kilos of gunpowder into the cannon (for those of you who do not like decimals either, this means she used one thousand times too much).
    Simply put, when Nanny Piggins blasted out of the cannon the children had no idea where she went. All they saw was a streak of pink pig flying across the sky at the speed of light. She passed over Dead Man’s Gorge and kept flying until she was a tiny pink dot disappearing over the horizon.
    ‘Oh dear!’ said Derrick.
    ‘Oh no!’ said Samantha.
    ‘Cool!’ said Michael.
    Boris did not say anything because he was too busy whimpering with his paws over his eyes.
    Never fear, Nanny Piggins was perfectly all right. She sent the children a