Free Nanny Piggins and the Race to Power 8 by R. A. Spratt Page A

touch with your emotions that you don’t realise how much you love your men,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘but I can see it as clear as the slightly bent nose on your face. So I want you all to be good soldiers and do as the Drill Sergeant says. Otherwise I’ll round up all these children, bring them down to the base and set them on you again.’
    ‘We’ll be good, we promise,’ said the soldiers quickly.
    ‘Remember you’re not just doing this for yourselves or for your country,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘you’re doing it for the right to wear a jaunty little brown beret that will look fabulous on all of you.’
    And so the men went back to the base having learnt a valuable lesson in military tactics – never take on a pig or two hundred hungry children.
    Nanny Piggins, Boris, Derrick, Samantha and Michael went home for breakfast — the 20 metre tall statue of Nanny Piggins. They had to eat it because Mirabella had turned up before Piers had a chance to finish it, and she had vandalised the statue by sticking a huge marzipan moustache under Nanny Piggins’ nose. Nanny Piggins thought it looked quite fetching, but she wanted to be mayor, not a bearded lady, plus she was peckish so she thought it best if they just ate the whole thing (she could always commission a chocolate statue to be carved later).

Nanny Piggins, Boris and the children had enjoyed a busy morning. They had been paying a visit to the local fire station so that Boris could get his monthly shower. (When you are a ten-foot-tall bear with a serious honey habit, your fur does tend to become extremely matted.) And Boris was too tall to fit in a regular shower cubicle so when he needed a wash, Nanny Piggins took her brother to the fire station to be blasted with their giant hoses. It was very beneficial for the firemen as well, because Boris would run around screaming, ‘Oooh aah oooh, it tickles, ooh stop it, oh more, that’s the spot, again again again,’ which was an excellent training exercise for them because it was just like having to put out a spreading bush fire.
    But this was not the exhausting part of their morning. The exhausting part came after Nanny Piggins noticed that the firemen were throwing out their old pole, the one they used to use to get from their dormitory upstairs to the fire truck downstairs in super quick time.
    The occupational health and safety officer had made them get rid of it because it was too likely to cause sprained ankles, completely ignoring the fact that sliding down a pole in the middle of the night with a siren blaring is so much fun it is totally worth any ankle injury.
    Seeing the long brass pole lying there in the driveway, Nanny Piggins immediately knew she had to take it home. She was not quite sure what she would use it for but she knew anything that long and fun to slide down had a lot of potential.
    Normally Nanny Piggins would have gone home, sat at the kitchen table and eaten cake as she contemplated the possibilities. But on this occasion it only took thinking of cake for Nanny Piggins to have a brilliant idea.
    ‘I could run the pole from my bedroom down to the kitchen!’ exclaimed Nanny Piggins. ‘That way, if I fancy a slice of cake in the middle of the night there’ll be no need to waste valuable time on opening the door or walking down the stairs in my hurry to get to it.’
    So the next hour or two were spent chainsawing a hole in Nanny Piggins’ bedroom floor. Followed by chainsawing another hole in Mr Green’s bedroom floor when they realised he had the bedroom above the kitchen. (Nanny Piggins was not disappointed to have vandalised her own floor. She was sure there were advantages to having a hole in her room. For example, with the aid of a system of mirrors she would be able to watch The Young and the Irritable on the living room television without getting out of bed.)
    All in all it was an action-packed morning. Especially for Boris whose job it was to stand in the kitchen, holding the