So the King locked the poor girl in the room, without even a chocolate bar to sustain herself. And naturally she did what all girls do in such circumstances, at least what they always did in the olden story days – she sat down and wept and wept.

  ‘Can I weep too?’ asked Boris, who was already tearing up at the tragic tale.

  ‘Of course, dear,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But try to do it quietly. We don’t want to startle any passing motorists and make them have car crashes.’

  But as the girl was weeping, suddenly the most amazing thing happened. A strange little man appeared. He was about half the height of a regular man and he had tall pointy ears, a long chin, a long nose and great big feet. The girl was too polite to comment about any of this. Obviously a person’s physical appearance shouldn’t matter. But I thought I should tell you all this so you can paint a picture in your minds.

  The strange man said, ‘I will spin all the straw into chocolate cake for you.’

  ‘You will?’ asked the girl, optimistically hoping that despite looking odd, this man was secretly really nice.

  ‘Yes,’ said the strange man. ‘But what shall you give me in exchange?’

  ‘He wasn’t so nice then?’ said Samantha.

  ‘No, people are always taking advantage of young girls forced to perform magical feats to keep their parents alive,’ said Nanny Piggins sadly. ‘But Bertha did have a ring her mother had given her before she died, so she offered this to the strange man.’

  And the strange man agreed. Bertha went to sleep in the corner of the room. The little man set to work, spinning the straw into chocolate cake. When Bertha awoke, the room was full of mud cake, sponge cake and sheet cake, all of the chocolate variety. It was stunning!

  When the King opened the door, fully expecting to find a weepy girl and a lot of straw, so he could have a good fun day of executing a loud-mouthed miller, he was stunned to see so many beautiful cakes. Now, a nice king would at this point have said, ‘I’m sorry to have doubted you, well done. I’m very impressed. You can run along home.’

  But that is not how kings think. The King had already shoved the first slice of cake into his mouth and was chocolate-cake crazed. He couldn’t believe how good it was. He wanted more. So he locked the girl in a bigger room, full of more straw and ordered her to do it again.

  Again she wept. And again the strange little man appeared. What would she give him this time? She did have a necklace that had belonged to her mother. She did not want to part with it, but if she didn’t, it would be certain death for her father. And annoying as he was – she couldn’t do that. So Bertha promised to hand it over.

  Again, she slept, again, the strange man spun, and in the morning the King opened the door and was astonished by the huge piles of cake. He couldn’t believe it. It was all so delicious. He wanted more. To be fair, the cake was so good, it could drive anyone crazy with cake-longing.

  The King grabbed Bertha and shoved her into a massive ballroom full of straw and demanded that she spin it all into cake. She just started weeping straight away this time. But this time the King’s offer was slightly different. This time, not only would he not kill her father, but he would marry Bertha if she did this.

  ‘Really?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘I know,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘Talk about the least-romantic marriage proposal ever. But kings are never good at these things. Even in fairytales, they never have anything witty or charming to say. They just get down on one knee and whip out a ring. The music swells. They never say anything clever at all.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a window she could climb out of?’ asked Michael.

  ‘No, sadly castles are always built with really narrow windows specifically to prevent fiancées escaping,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Who knows how the stories of Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty would have ended if that were not the case?’

  So the King left, the girl wept and the strange man appeared. But this time, Bertha had nothing left to offer him. She had no more jewellery. But the strange man said that was all right. He would accept something else. He would spin the whole ballroom full of straw into chocolate cake if – after she married the King and had her first child – she gave the baby to him.

  ‘What?’ said Michael.

  ‘That’s just crazy,’ said Samantha.

  ‘I know,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘If you had the ability to transform straw into cake, why would you want a baby? You’d be too busy eating cake! It doesn’t make any sense at all. But stories rarely do.’

  Now obviously Bertha did not want to agree to this. It was crazy. But she reasoned that, even if the King married her the following day, it would be at least nine months before she had a baby, possibly longer. And who knew what might happen before then? The strange man might forget about it, or he might be killed in an avalanche or he might choke on a chicken bone. It was worth the risk. So Bertha agreed.

  She slept, the cake was spun and when the King walked in the next morning, he dropped down on one knee and offered her a ring. Bertha rolled her eyes at the predictability of this cliché, but accepted because none of the other men back in the village were much chop either, so she might as well make do with the King.

  ‘It doesn’t sound like a good way to start a relationship,’ said Samantha.

  ‘No,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘But fortunately, on the first day they were married, the King suffered a nasty head injury.’

  ‘Really?’ said Derrick.

  ‘What sort of head injury?’ asked Michael.

  ‘An anvil dropped on his head,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘It totally transformed his personality. And he was quite nice after that. So Bertha, now Queen Bertha, actually ended up having quite a happy marriage with him.’

  A year later, she gave birth to their first child. Bertha expected the strange little man to appear straight away, but he didn’t. So Bertha began to hope that perhaps he had forgotten.

  It was, however, not to be. When the baby turned one, the strange little man did appear. He had cleverly waited until the baby was past that difficult-to-look-after age with all the spoon-feeding and bottles and having to carry it everywhere. Typical man! Avoiding all the hard bits. Anyway, the strange little man demanded that Queen Bertha hand the baby over right away.

  Bertha begged and pleaded with him and offered him all kinds of riches. But the strange man just laughed. He thought it was a tremendous joke to have a queen begging him.

  She pleaded to be allowed to keep her baby or she might die of a broken heart. The little man enjoyed being cruel, so he saw a way he could draw this out longer. He said he would give her three days. If she could guess his name in that time, then she could keep her baby. If not, then the child would be his.

  So the strange man went away and the Queen hurried to get out a pen and paper. She started writing down every name she could think of – John, James, Adam, Nigel, Peter . . . all the obvious names first. When the strange little man came back the next day, Queen Bertha had two thousand names and she read them out one at a time. But to each one he’d say ‘No!’, chuckling and giggling to himself. ‘You’ll have to try harder if you’re going to work out my name,’ he said with delight before disappearing into the night.

  The next day, the Queen spent all her time thinking of unusual names – Rueben, Bartholomew, Atticus, Linseed Oil, Compass, Toilet Brush.

  ‘That’s not a name,’ Michael pointed out.

  ‘Not to us,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But perhaps this strange little man had a mother with a very odd sense of humour.’

  It didn’t matter, because none of these names were right either. The Queen had just one more day to find the right one. She was desperate, so she sent the palace guards out on swift horses, to travel as far as they could in one day, looking for different names.

  It turns out that this was a brilliant idea, because one of the guards, when he was coming home, was running late, so he took a shortcut through the woods . . .

  ‘Not the woods!’ wailed Boris. ‘All the worst things happen in woods.’

  ‘And in the middle of the woods,’ continued Nanny Piggins, ignoring her brother.

  The guard came across a strange cottage with a strange little man gleefully dancing around and singing.

  Tonight tonight, my plans I make,

  Tomorrow tomorrow, the baby I take.

  The Queen will never win the game,

  For Rumpelstiltskin is my name!

  The guard reported back to the Queen what the strange man had said. Bertha knew she had the right name now. When the little man appeared that night, he was bursting with excitement because he thought he was about to get the baby.

  ‘Give me the baby! Give me the baby!’ he demanded.

  ‘Not yet,’ said the Queen. ‘You haven’t given me a chance to guess your name.’

  The strange man laughed, ‘You’ll never guess. You might as well give me my baby now.’

  ‘Is it Bath Salt?’ asked the Queen.

  ‘No,’ laughed the man.

  ‘Is it Oregano?’ asked the Queen.

  ‘No!’ cackled the man.

  ‘Is it . . . Rumpelstiltskin?’ she asked.

  The strange man looked like he’d swallowed a rock. His eyes bulged, his face turned red, then he screamed with rage. ‘How did you know?! No, no, no!’

  He then threw the biggest temper tantrum ever seen before or since in all of history. Even bigger than the tantrums you see two-year-olds throw at the supermarket when their mothers won’t let them push the shopping trolley into the ankles of the other customers. It was way worse than that. Rumpelstiltskin shook his fists and stomped his feet so hard that the ground opened up in a huge crack that he fell into, and he was never seen again.

  ‘Wow, that’s a dramatic ending,’ said Derrick.

  ‘I know,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘I think my dear cousin may have embellished that bit, but you can’t begrudge her some artistic license. In all other regards it’s a tremendous yarn. So the Queen and the baby – and the King, who was much more pleasant after his head injury – all lived happily ever after. The King never again tried to get his wife to spin straw into cake. He just let her bake cake in the kitchen like a normal person. And the Queen never again promised to give her baby away, no matter how annoying her husband was. The end. Time for bed.’

  ‘We’re still miles from home,’ said Samantha.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Well, we’d better hurry up and get there faster if we’re going to bed. Oh look, a pizza delivery car. Let’s commandeer that!’

  So Nanny Piggins leapt into the road and commandeered a pizza delivery car, and they all got a lift home with the very kind driver. Inevitably, this led to them eating as much margherita pizza as was physically possible. Which was a surprising amount after all that walking. The driver didn’t mind. As he said, he’d have to drive to their house anyway if they ordered, so it didn’t make any difference to him.

  The end.

  Fun Fact

  In psychology, there is a concept called the ‘Rumpelstiltskin Principle’. The idea is that if you use a person’s correct name, it affects the power balance in your relationship. Think about it – have you ever met a teacher outside of school and they say you can use their first name? It feels weird, doesn’t it? Or when you’re messing about and a teacher calls out your full name – it really gets your attention, doesn’t it? This is the Rumpelstiltskin Principle.

  It was late and the children should have been in bed, but they were too full of adrenaline to fall asleep. You see, it was report card day. This was always a high-energy day in the Green household. At least, it was since Nanny Piggins had come to live with them.

  Nanny Piggins believed that it was wrong for a government institution to send secret letters to parents, reporting on their child’s behaviour. She considered it tantamount to espionage and snitching. So, as a point of principle, she never let Mr Green see any of the children’s report cards.

  At least, not their real report cards. She did allow him to get a glimpse of a fake report card, made out of peanut brittle, once. But aside from that one occasion, she always went to great lengths to make sure that the reports were removed from the letter box and destroyed before he knew they had arrived.

  This was harder than you might think because Nanny Piggins often destroyed Mr Green’s mail. Either to punish him for irritating her (this happened most days) or so he’d never find any written complaints about her behaviour (the man at the health food store had been writing to Mr Green weekly, begging Mr Green to stop her from yelling ‘BOOOOO!’ every time she walked past his store).

  The children actually got very good report cards. Solid B+ averages. They might have got As in history if they hadn’t been taught so much of that subject by Nanny Piggins herself. Her account so rarely aligned with the official written record.

  When the post was delivered, Mr Green usually sprinted up the front path to get to it first – before Nanny Piggins could interfere with his correspondence. But on this day, when she knew the reports would be coming, Nanny Piggins went to even greater lengths to thwart her employer. She had intercepted the postman three blocks away and bribed him (with a sticky date pudding) to lend her his uniform and delivery bicycle.

  Then Nanny Piggins got the retired army colonel who lived around the corner to pretend to be the postman and deliver a fake letter. Mr Green eagerly snatched up this forged letter and ran back into the house.

  If Mr Green had any common sense, he’d have realised this letter was a fake because why would the Queen of Denmark be writing to him for tax advice? But Mr Green had no common sense, so Nanny Piggins knew she would get away with it. As a result, when the report cards were put in the letterbox, Mr Green didn’t realise they were there. He was too busy looking up grovelling adjectives in his thesaurus for his return letter to the Queen of Denmark.

  Now that the report cards were in the letterbox, Nanny Piggins couldn’t destroy them herself. That would be wrong. And being wrong was against her principles. But she had spent six months training fifty garden snails to eat letters. She now released these snails into their new home – the letterbox. If snails could squeal with delight, they would have done so as they tumbled onto the delicious report cards.

  ‘But what if father finds out?’ asked Michael.

  ‘If the snails eat the report cards that’s not my fault,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘It’s Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. The report cards weren’t destined to survive if they weren’t fit enough to fight off a few snails.’

  ‘Fifty snails,’ amended Michael.

  ‘I could have trained sixty,’ said Nanny Piggins, ‘But I wanted to give the reports a sporting chance. Now, what shall we do to celebrate?’

  ‘Um,’ said the children.

  Fortunately, the choice was made for them, because at that point an ice-cream van drove past the end of the street. So, Nanny Piggins leapt on the postman’s bicycle, ordered all three children to jump up on the handle bars, and they took off after it.

  Chasing an ice-cream van is not an easy task when you’re a four-foot-tall pig with one-foot-long legs. The ice-cream-van man had tried to outrun them because Nanny Piggins always abused him for the stinginess of the chocolate in his chocolate dipped cones. But, as the driver swerved to avoid a blow from her handbag swinging in through his open window, the ice-cream van hit a fire hydrant. It erupted like a volcano of water. And this eruption soon erupted into a spontaneous water fight of all the neighbourhood children.

  Eventually the police had arrived, and the ice-cream-van man tried to press charges. But the Police Sergeant could not be convinced that ‘riding a bicycle in an intimidating manner’ was a crime that would hold up in a court of law.

  Then the Police Sergeant pointed out that the ice-cream-van man had been driving in a reckless manner. So, to avoid jail time, the ice-cream man had bribed the Police Sergeant by giving him, the Constable, Nanny Piggins and all the neighbourhood children double-scoop cones. Then the ice-cream-van man had given up and joined the water fight himself, having a marvellous time.

  As you can imagine, after spending the day in such a manner, the children were tired but also too excited to drift off to sleep. All the sugar in the multiple double-scoop cones probably hadn’t helped either.

  ‘Why don’t you tell us a story,’ suggested Derrick.

  ‘All right,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘If you hadn’t been there yourselves, I could tell you the story of today, because it’s been quite marvellous and I’m sure it will go down in the history books as one of your best report card days ever.’

  ‘At least nothing caught fire this year,’ said Samantha.

  ‘Why don’t I tell you the story of my distant cousin,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Tom Thumb.’

  ‘Was Tom short for Thomasina?’ asked Michael. ‘Because your distant cousin was actually a girl and a pig?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Well, naturally Tom was a pig. But what on earth made you think Tom was a girl?’

  ‘That often seems to be the case when you tell your stories,’ explained Derrick.

  ‘Well, not in this instance,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘No, Tom was a Piggins. But he came from the no-good branch of the family. In fact, his real name was Bramwell. Bramwell Piggins the forty-third.’

  (In case you don’t recall, dear reader, Nanny Piggins herself had a brother called Bramwell and he was the worst of all her siblings, which was really saying something because she had thirteen identical twin sisters who were all evil in entirely different ways.)

  ‘So the Bramwell we’ve met, your brother,’ said Samantha, ‘which Bramwell is he?’

  ‘Bramwell Piggins the one hundred and fifty-seventh,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Sadly, each generation in history has been cursed with a Bramwell, and each one is every bit as no-good and useless as the last.’

  ‘Wow, that’s unlucky,’ said Michael.

  ‘Luck has nothing to do with it,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘It’s genetics. It’s the deoxyribonucleic acid in their chromosomes. It forces them to be useless wastrels from the day they’re born.’