‘It’s fabulous,’ said the King. ‘The things you do with butter and sugar are just magical.’

  ‘That’s lovely of you to say, although it is a bit sad,’ said Scherazade. ‘Because if you like that one, you’d really like my lemon drizzle cake. But never mind. I’d better get to sleep so I look my best for my execution tomorrow. Nighty-night.’

  ‘Wait a second,’ said the King. ‘What’s this lemon drizzle cake you speak of?’

  ‘Oh, it’s just a lemon sponge cake topped with a sour lemon sauce that soaks right down into the cake, making it deliciously moist but also tangy and sour. Then that’s covered in a hard lemon icing for a crunchy texture on top and an extra sweetness hit.’

  ‘Urrrrgh,’ said the King. As he imagined this, drool was spilling out of his mouth. ‘That does sound good. Perhaps we could put off your execution just one day more, so you could make this lemon drizzle cake for me.’

  ‘If you’re sure,’ said Scheherazade, ‘I know you’re a busy king. I’d hate to mess up your schedule with another postponement. I’ll do it if you’re absolutely certain you’ll be able to find time to execute me later.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m sure I can make it work,’ said the King.

  And so they continued. Every day, Scheherazade would make the King a cake. Every night, Scheherazade would promise to make him one just as good the following day. And every morning the king would postpone her execution.

  Now, a normal brilliant pastry chef would run out of recipes after a few months, but not Scheherazade, because she was a Piggins. Scheherazade kept it up, one magnificent cake after another for one thousand and one nights.

  ‘Didn’t eating all that cake make the King morbidly obese?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘No, actually it didn’t,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Eating all that cake super energised him.’

  He became a much better king. He was able to focus better in meetings and have more energy for walking around looking at things or whatever it is that kings do. People started to really like him, because of his clear, sharp intelligence and boundless energy for hard work.

  And so, on the one thousand and first night, when Scheherazade made the King a spectacular coconut cream cake and he hastily shoved it into his mouth, the King looked up and saw into Scheherazade’s eyes and realised – he had fallen in love with her.

  ‘Awww,’ said Samantha.

  He knew now she was much cleverer than him. And much more powerful. Because he only ruled a mighty empire, whereas she commanded the forces of cake baking. The fact that he was married to her made him the luckiest man alive.

  ‘I don’t want to chop your head off,’ said the King.

  ‘I know,’ said Scheherazade. ‘My breathtaking beauty often has that effect on men, especially when I combine it with the beauty of my cake.’

  ‘Can you forgive me for my foolishness?’ asked the King.

  ‘Of course,’ said Scheherazade. ‘It would be foolish to be cross with someone for being foolish, and I am not foolish.’

  ‘And so they lived happily ever after. The end. Time for bed,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘It’s four o’clock in the afternoon,’ Derrick reminded her.

  ‘So it is,’ said Nanny Piggins, checking the clock. ‘Then it’s time for a little pre-dinner snack. All this talk of cake has made me hungry. Who’d like a chocolate mud cake?’

  ‘But that’s not the Scheherazade my teacher told us about,’ said Michael. ‘He told us, Scheherazade won her husband over by telling him stories every night. And the stories were so good, the King always wanted to hear the end the next day. And that’s why he didn’t chop her head off.’

  ‘Oh, she did that too,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘She told him a story while he ate the cake. And stories always seem extra especially good when the right snack is involved.’

  The end.

  Fun Fact

  When King Henry the Eighth of England arranged his second wife’s execution (Anne Boleyn), he sent for an expert swordsman to sail over from France. At that time in Britain, executions were traditionally done with an axe, but it was highly unusual to execute a Queen so they thought it more dignified to use a sword. Henry wanted to make sure the job was done professionally.

  Derrick, Samantha and Michael were exhausted. They’d had a fairly mundane day at school, but when Nanny Piggins met them at the bus stop, she was hopping up and down excitedly.

  ‘You must run home with me this instant!’ cried Nanny Piggins.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘Is the house on fire?’ asked Michael.

  ‘Again?’ asked Samantha.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Much better than that! I’ve made an enormous tower of profiteroles filled with fresh whipped cream and smothered in hot chocolate sauce. So you must come home with me immediately before I lose control of myself and eat them all without you.’

  The children didn’t need to be told twice. They set off sprinting.

  Twenty minutes later, the ten-foot-tall dessert tower had been demolished. Eating that much choux pastry, chocolate and cream would have been tiring at the best of times, but add in the sprinting as well and they were all knackered.

  ‘How was school today?’ asked Nanny Piggins. She didn’t really want to know, but she didn’t want to move either and she reasoned that striking up a conversation would be a good excuse for sitting still.

  ‘Uuug,’ moaned Michael.

  ‘Eurgh,’ groaned Derrick.

  This partly expressed their opinion of their educational experience, but it mainly summarised their emotional response to the volume of food they had just eaten.

  ‘We learned about proverbs,’ said Samantha.

  ‘You poor thing,’ sympathised Nanny Piggins. ‘Proverbs are all right in themselves, but they are too often used by irritating people to be irritating. I don’t know why people think it’s clever to be brief.’

  ‘What is a proverb?’ asked Michael. Being the youngest, he had been the least exposed to arcane rhetorical devices.

  ‘It’s a short, well-known saying stating a general truth or advice,’ said Samantha, in a sing-song tone, having had this repeatedly drummed into her during the day.

  ‘I still don’t get it,’ said Michael. ‘Can you give me an example?’

  ‘Sure, here’s one – a stitch in time saves nine,’ said Samantha.

  ‘That one is true,’ said Nanny Piggins, as she tried to lick chocolate sauce from her eyebrow. ‘If you have to run a cross country race, it is always better to get one stitch at the beginning of the race. That way, you can collapse and beg to be taken to hospital instead of enduring the whole thing and getting nine different stitches along the way.’

  ‘I know another one!’ said Derrick. ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’

  ‘That is an outrageous lie,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘If a cookbook is covered in food stains, then clearly it has been used constantly because the recipes are brilliant. Therefore, the cover is an excellent way to judge the excellence of the book.’

  ‘How about this one?’ said Samantha. ‘Kill not the goose that lays the golden eggs.’

  Nanny Piggins gasped and clutched her chest.

  ‘Oh, my dear, you must never mention her,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Mention who?’ asked Samantha.

  ‘Poor Roberta,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ said Samantha. ‘I don’t know anyone called Roberta.’

  ‘You brought her up,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘My dear friend, Roberta the goose.’

  ‘You know the goose who laid the golden egg?’ asked Michael.

  ‘I just told you not to mention her!’ snapped Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Michael. ‘We just didn’t realise you knew her.’

  ‘I didn’t realise she was real,’ said Samantha. ‘I thought she was just a character from a story.’

  ‘Just because someone is fictional doesn’t make them any less real,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  The children frowned as they thought about this. They were pretty sure it made no sense. But it was never a good idea to contradict Nanny Piggins.

  ‘I thought that the story of the . . .’ began Derrick.

  Nanny Piggins glowered at him.

  ‘. . . the precious metal laying farm bird,’ said Derrick carefully, ‘was a story from the ancient story times, told by Aesop.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘And she told it about an old family friend of the Piggins’, Roberta the goose.’

  The children thought about this. They knew that Nanny Piggins had fabulously glamorous relatives throughout history, so it made sense that she would also have fabulously glamorous family friends as well.

  ‘So what is the true story?’ asked Michael. He knew his nanny claimed not to want to talk about it, but Nanny Piggins loved regaling them with a good yarn. Michael sensed she was itching to share this one with them, and he was entirely correct.

  ‘Well, Roberta was a goose,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  But she always had a fabulous eye for beautiful things. Her feathers were always beautifully coiffed, her bill was the most elegant orange and her feet were delightfully webbed.

  So naturally, when she started laying eggs, Roberta wanted them to look good. Eggshell-coloured eggs are nice enough. Most geese put a lot of thought into whether they lay an egg that is off-white, or beige, or perhaps the more daring among them might choose a tinge of blue. But Roberta was not a goose of half measures. She wanted her egg to be fabulous. So she decided to lay an egg that was gold.

  ‘The shell was actual gold?’ asked Derrick. He was wondering if Nanny Piggins meant real gold, or if Roberta had just bought some gold spray paint from her local hardware store.

  ‘Oh no, the whole thing was gold,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Solid right the way through. Pure twenty-four carat gold. And I mean carat as in the measurement of gold purity. Not carrot as in that horrible orange vegetable that people use to ruin cake.’

  Her solid gold egg was stunning. You had to wear sunglasses when you looked at it, it was that shiny. The other geese applauded when they saw it. They knew immediately that it was a work of art and that Roberta was a maestro of egg laying. The problem was, the peasants who owned her were deeply stupid.

  ‘You’re not meant to say people are stupid, Nanny Piggins,’ Samantha reminded her.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘It is deeply wrong to say someone is stupid when they are not. And if someone is stupid, it’s cruel to let them know. After all, they are stupid, so they won’t figure it out for themselves if you don’t tell them. But in this instance, it was true and it was also crucial to the plot that you understand that these two peasants were deeply, deeply, all the way through to the bone – stupid.’

  They were also greedy. When Roberta started presenting them with great, big, solid gold goose eggs in her nesting box, they were delighted. Now, you three children have led sheltered lives, so you have probably never eaten a goose egg.

  ‘No,’ agreed the children.

  ‘What you need to understand is – they are big,’ explained Nanny Piggins. ‘Twice as big as a chicken’s egg. In fact, geese generally are much bigger than chickens. You can’t tell when you see a goose in the distance, in a field. But let me tell you when an angry goose is running at you – honking, flapping its wings and trying to bite you – you immediately become conscious of the fact that geese are large birds. There’s a reason people eat goose at Christmas time – because there is a lot to go around.’

  ‘Anyway, where was I . . . ? Oh yes, the silly peasants,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  They couldn’t believe their luck, having a goose that laid massive, solid gold eggs. For the first time in their lives, they had something of value. But of course – as is always the case – as soon as someone gets something of value, they never pause for a millisecond to enjoy it. No, they leap straight to wanting something of greater value. The peasants looked at this golden egg and wondered – how did Roberta do it?

  To be fair, this was excellent scientific thinking – they were attempting to use deductive reasoning, like detectives. How did a goose lay an egg of gold, instead of an egg made out of egg? Unfortunately, their cleverness stopped there. The peasants reasoned that the goose must have laid a golden egg because she had a big lump of gold inside her.

  ‘But that’s just . . .’ began Derrick.

  ‘Stupid?’ suggested Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Silly,’ said Derrick.

  ‘Yes, yes, and silly is the polite word for stupid,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But to be fair, it was the ancient story days. There were no published works on poultry anatomy, or indeed published works on anything, because it was still two thousand years before the invention of the printing press. The peasants had no idea how the insides of a goose worked. There was a lot of silliness going around in Aesop’s time.’

  Anyway, the peasants lay in bed that night thinking about their goose and the big lump of gold they believed to be inside her, and they soon decided that they wanted that big lump of gold. The only thing better than a big egg of gold was an even bigger lump of gold, so they woke up the next morning and killed Roberta.

  ‘Noooooooo,’ wailed Boris.

  ‘Boris,’ Samantha said kindly, ‘It was over two thousand years ago. You had to know that Roberta wasn’t still alive.’

  ‘There’s a difference between knowing and knowing,’ said Boris, sobbing into his sleeve. Not that he wore a shirt, but he liked to pretend that the fur on his arm was a sleeve.

  ‘And what do you think they found inside Roberta?’ asked Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Not a lump of gold,’ guessed Michael.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  They just found normal goose guts. Roberta had died for nothing. And now the peasants no longer had a goose that laid golden eggs.

  ‘That’s a horrifically violent story,’ wailed Boris. ‘You shouldn’t tell it to children. Or bears! The children might be able to cope, but it’s too much for a bear of my sensitive nature.’

  ‘I know,’ agree Nanny Piggins. ‘A dreadful story. In every way. But that’s just the way Aesop tells it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Derrick.

  ‘Well, the story is famous because it was told by Aesop, the great storyteller, two thousand six hundred years ago in ancient Greece,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  ‘Yes,’ said the children.

  ‘Well, she must have had a bus to catch that day or something,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Because that’s just the first half of the tale. She makes out that the story is a fable teaching you that it’s foolish to destroy what you have out of greed for more, because you’ll be left with nothing.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why our teacher told us the story,’ agreed Samantha.

  ‘But that’s not how the real story ended,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘Roberta’s demise was just the beginning.’

  ‘It was?’ asked Samantha.

  You see Roberta had sisters. She had thirteen identical sisters in fact. They were fourteentuplets.

  ‘Just like you,’ said Michael. ‘You’ve got thirteen identical sisters too.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Nanny Piggins. ‘It is quite the coincidence. Naturally, none of the sisters got along.’

  ‘That’s just like you and your sisters too,’ said Derrick.

  ‘That’s just like all sisters everywhere, my dear,’ said Nanny Piggins. ‘But just because sisters didn’t get along, did not mean they would tolerate their sister being killed just to see if she had solid gold internal organs.’

  When they heard what the peasants had done, they were seriously cross. None of them had seen each other for years – they couldn’t bear to be in the same barnyard. But when Roberta died, they set aside their petty differences and regrouped. They swore an oath of rewengé!

  ‘Rewengé?’’ asked Michael.

  ‘It’s what you do when you want revenge, but you want to be more dramatic,’ said Nanny Piggins.

  So they set to work hunting the peasants down. The peasants tried fleeing. They travelled from country to country, desperate to evade the terrifying flock of angry vengeful geese. But Roberta’s sisters were relentless. They pursued the peasants across Europe, into Asia and looped back around through Africa, which was lovely. They got to do a lot of sight-seeing along the way. They particularly enjoyed taking in the ancient pyramids at Giza.

  Eventually, Roberta’s sisters cornered the peasants in India, right at the very bottom of the country. The peasants couldn’t swim, so they couldn’t get away from the geese. They had to give up. Of course, this pursuit had taken many decades and the peasants were now aged 102 and 103 respectively, so the geese took pity on them. They merely bit them hard on the shins, gave them a stern talking to and made them promise to never hurt a goose again.

  And that is the real story of the goose that lay the golden egg. And the real moral to that story is – don’t aggravate a goose, especially if that goose has thirteen identical twin sisters. Which is why, to this day, people still use geese as watch-dogs on farms and properties, because they are so grumpy and vengeful you know they will keep intruders at bay.

  The end.

  Fun Fact

  If you have a goose and it lays a golden egg, that is a serious medical condition. Consult a vet immediately.

  Mum and Tammy were walking home from the panel-beaters. Mum had run over a star picket outside the gym, and the skirt panel of her car needed to be replaced. It was a sore topic with Mum. She was very angry about that star picket.

  Mum liked to process her feelings and be rational about them, but that process could take time and in the meantime she would be irrational. Tammy, indeed everyone in the family, knew not to mention either star pickets, skirt panels or the cost of panel-beating to Mum until she had fully rationalised her emotions.

  But they were enjoying the walk. It was different to the walks they normally took. It was through an industrial area they never normally went to. Even Stanley, the dog, was enjoying it. There were so many different things to smell.