Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang Read Free

round the corner. They shouted and jumped and made loads of noise. As soon as he’d gone from view everyone fell silent. Mrs Green looked at the three sad faces.
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    g
    ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Dad’ll want something sweet when he comes home so let’s make him some strawberry jam. I’ve saved up sugar specially for it!’
    This idea rather cheered the children up, so they went back home, picked strawberries and made a really gorgeous pot of jam for Mr Green’s return. Megsie made the frilly top and tied the ribbon and Vincent drew the label with more care than usual. Mrs Green put it in its own special corner of the pantry shelf. Every day from then on, Vincent would go and check to see it was safe and hadn’t been eaten by mice.

The Diary 4
    It’s Day Two and raining hard. No strawberries here, that’s for sure. All the wheels on the cameras and lights get stuck in the mud and we work at least 30 per cent slower than usual. Phil Sindall, our Camera Operator (see Glossary), is sitting on the Dolly (see Glossary) with his forehead resting on the eyepiece. He is meditating while he waits. There is no one who has to be more patient than a Camera Operator, and there is no Camera Operator more patient than Phil. It’s a bit like having Buddha on the set.
    There’s absolutely nothing going on here.
    I suppose I’d better just get on with the story.

The Story 4
    The days and weeks went by and were filled with all the usual chores and with Mrs Green’s job. She worked at the village shop, which was owned and run by a frantically old lady called Mrs Docherty. It was a lovely shop, full of coloured drawers, and ladders in case you needed anything from ‘up top’. In the olden days, Mrs Docherty had colour-coded everything. Lentils went in the orange drawer, knicker elastic in the pink drawer and tap washers in the grey drawer, that sort of thing. But she had forgotten what colour was for what years ago and now everything was jumbled in, higgledy-piggledy. Mrs Green knew the shop inside out though and could always find you exactly what you wanted. She loved Mrs Docherty but had to admit that failing memory and eyesight did render her something of a liability. Mrs Green was apt to find soap snuggled in with oats (which had a slightly carbolic aftertaste as a result) and, on one occasion, rice mixed up with the ball-bearings. It wasn’t easy.
    All the children wrote lots of letters to their father and so did Mrs Green, and they would normally get a lovely letter back, always from a different place. Once they had even got a letter from Africa, and Mrs Green had said to the children that at least it was nice that their dad was getting to see a bit of the world. But for the past few months, they had written and written and got no reply.
    That morning, the postman had come to the door with a letter which caused huge excitement. But it wasn’t one of the little blue envelopes they were used to receiving from their father. It was a letter made of thick cream parchment paper, the sort of stuff you don’t expect to see except in castles. The writing on it was elegant and sloping and it smelled very faintly of bergamot.
    All the children were very curious about it indeed and crowded about Mrs Green as she carefully opened the envelope.
    ‘Oh!’ she said, and sat back in her chair, staring at the beautiful paper in perplexity.
    ‘What, what?’ said Megsie. ‘Can I look?’
    Mrs Green handed her the letter and explained to the others that her sister, Prunella (about whom you know so much but Norman, Megsie and Vincent knew next to nothing) was worried about bombs dropping in London and was going to send her two children to stay in the country with the Greens.
    It was all very sudden.
    Mrs Green was perfectly astonished because after she’d been cut off without a penny, she’d only seen her sister once. Prunella, who was now Lady Gray, had made the journey from London to the farm in a pale blue Rolls-Royce. When she’d