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be the ‘Greatest Flying Animal in all the World’, when there are so many animals that have wings – for instance, birds. But you have to understand, for circus folk, a flying animal that uses wings is just cheating. It would be like the bearded lady sticking a toupee to her chin, or the trapeze artists wrapping themselves in bubble wrap in case they fall, or the strong man getting a friend to help him lift things. When Nanny Piggins and Eduardo talk about the ‘Greatest Flying Animal’, they both mean the same thing – being fired out of a cannon. Which is something to boast about because being fired out of a cannon is really difficult. Whereas flapping wings is really simple, if you’ve got them. Now, back to the story.
    Nanny Piggins’ eyes narrowed. ‘You?’ she said, managing to compact an enormous amount of contempt into that one short word.
    ‘Yes, I,’ said Eduardo. ‘For I, too, belong to acircus. And I, too, am fired out of a cannon. And it offends me to have a mere woman, and a mere pig, claiming to be better than me.’
    ‘Really?’ said Nanny Piggins, as she looked over the armadillo from head to toe, trying to decide which part of him she was going to bite first.
    ‘Yes, really,’ said Eduardo. ‘So I challenge you to a duel, to prove once and for all that I am the Greatest Animal Aviationist Alive.’ (This is just a showing-off way of saying ‘Flying Animal’.)
    ‘Okay,’ said Nanny Piggins, deciding that the armadillo’s plated shell looked too difficult to bite, and that she would have to be content with punishing him another way. ‘Where and when?’
    ‘Tomorrow morning at dawn,’ declared Eduardo.
    ‘Fine,’ said Nanny Piggins, even though, in her opinion, the only decent thing to do at dawn was sleep.
    ‘We shall align our cannons side by side, then fire them to see who goes the furthest,’ continued the armadillo.
    ‘All right,’ said Nanny Piggins. It sounded simple enough to her.
    ‘And to make things interesting,’ added Eduardo, ‘we will fire our cannons across –’ he paused here for dramatic effect – ‘Dead Man’s Gorge!’
    ‘No!’ gasped all three Green children.
    ‘What’s Dead Man’s Gorge?’ asked Nanny Piggins. She was not sure if it was a geographical feature, or something you found in the pocket of a man who had died from eating too much.
    ‘Dead Man’s Gorge is two cliff faces either side of a gaping two hundred and nineteen foot drop into the sea,’ announced Eduardo as melodramatically as only a Latin American can.
    ‘Oh,’ said Nanny Piggins, as she mentally tried to picture what two hundred and nineteen feet looked like. A few quick sums gave her the answer – a twenty-storeyed building or, to put it in terms of food (which is how Nanny Piggins always preferred to think of maths), two hundred and nineteen foot-long hotdogs laid out end to end.
    ‘Do you accept my challenge, little pig?’ asked Eduardo rudely, ‘or will you simply surrender any claim you have made for the title of “World’s Greatest Flying Animal”?’
    ‘Let me answer you like this,’ said Nanny Piggins. And she picked up the glove, slapped Eduardo hard across the face and slammed the front door in his snout before he had time to blink. She had yet to prove that she could fly further than Eduardo, butshe certainly had much quicker reflexes than any armadillo.
    So Nanny Piggins and the Green children sat with their backs to the front door, thinking (or in Samantha’s case, worrying, because that’s what she did whenever she thought).
    ‘What are you going to do?’ worried Samantha. She didn’t want to see her nanny plummet two hundred and nineteen feet into the sea, or worse still, plummet two hundred and nineteen feet onto the rocks next to the sea.
    ‘You could lay out mattresses on the rocks,’ suggested Michael.
    ‘You could use a parachute,’ suggested Derrick.
    ‘You could run away,’ suggested Samantha.
    ‘Hmm,’ said Nanny Piggins, as