Free The Nanny Piggins Guide to Conquering Christmas by R. A. Spratt Page A

had eaten an apple right before ringing her nanny. (Nanny Piggins did not approve of fruit, especially in its raw form. She was suspicious of anything that was good for your bowels.)
    Michael shrugged. ‘Nanny Piggins can do anything.’
    Nanny Piggins continued to speak on the phone. ‘Wendy, I want you to gather all our sisters and have them here are the Green house by 10.15 today . . . What do you mean “Why should I?” Isn’t a polite request from your sister enough?’
    ‘When was she polite?’ asked Derrick.
    ‘I’ll make it worth your while,’ promised Nanny Piggins. ‘If you get them all here on time I shall buy you one box of fudge. The largest one available from Mr Flomberg’s Fudgetorium.’
    The children heard the phone click on the other end as Wendy hung up.
    ‘Now we just sit and wait,’ said Nanny Piggins.
    ‘And eat more friands?’ asked Michael.
    ‘Of course we eat friands,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘Plus we’d better whip up some real refreshments. My sisters are not going to put up with your father’s shabby standards when it comes to hospitality. If there isn’t a large quantity of A-grade cake plus apricot danishes for Anthea, the subsequent riot may very well cause structural damage to your home.’

    At 8.02 am the Greens began to arrive. They were every bit as detestable as Nanny Piggins had imagined. First to arrive was Cousin Agnetha, an utterly unpleasant woman. She always looked like she had been sucking on a lemon, because she had always been sucking on a lemon. She needed to, to keep scurvy at bay. She was so miserly she only ever ate home brand porridge, which meant she was prone to vitamin C deficiency (scurvy). To counteract this she did not buy vitamin C tablets from the chemist. No, that would be too lavish. Instead, she went out every night at midnight, climbed her back fence and stole a lemon from her next door neighbour’s tree and then spent the next day sucking on it.
    Next came Uncle Waldo. He smelt even worse than Mr Green because he had discovered some time in the mid-eighties that you can save a fortune on socks if you don’t wear them. And since he did not mind the smell of his own feet (it is a peculiarity of evolution that people with a normally perfectly good sense of smell, for some reason do not mind the whiff of their own body odour), during the three decades since he had stopped wearing socks he had saved nearly two hundred dollars. (He had not spent much money on socks beforehand.)
    And then came Great Aunt Hilda. A shrewd, shrivelled old lady who enjoyed saying mean things to see how people would react. She was the one who concocted the whole ‘Santa Photo Scheme’ (see Chapter 1 , or use your memory) purely because she knew how much it made Mr Green squirm to remember that he had three children.
    By 9.45 the house was full of two dozen people who only had three things in common – their surname was Green, they were unpleasant and they smelt like they had left their washing out on the line for a week in rainy weather (which incidentally, if you have ever left your clothes on the line for a week and wondered what that smell is, it’s fungus and bacteria growing between the fibres of your clothes).
    ‘Do you think if we called the Police Sergeant we could have them all arrested?’ asked Nanny Piggins as they watched the amassed Greens all sitting silently in the living room through the peepholes in the kitchen wall. (Nanny Piggins had drilled four holes in the wall specifically for this purpose so they could all peek at whoever was in the living room at once, because the inconvenient thing about peepholes is usually that you have to take turns peeking.)
    ‘The Police Sergeant is on holiday in Bermuda,’ said Derrick.
    ‘Do you think he would cut his holiday short?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘This is an emergency. The floor may very well collapse under the weight of their boringness.’
    ‘It’s five minutes to ten,’ said Samantha. ‘Your