Trouble in Paradise

PUFFIN CANADA

TROUBLE IN PARADISE

ERIC WALTERS
is the highly acclaimed, bestselling author of more than sixty novels for children and young adults. His books have won the Silver Birch and the Red Maple Awards, as well as numerous other prizes, including the White Pine, Snow Willow, Tiny Torgi, Ruth Schwartz and IODE Violet Downey Book Awards. His novels have also received honours from the Canadian Library Association Book Awards and the Children’s Book Centre, and won UNESCO’s international award for Literature in Service of Tolerance.

To find out more about Eric and his novels, or to arrange for him to speak at your school, visit his website at
www.ericwalters.net
.

Also by Eric Walters from Penguin Canada

The Bully Boys

The Hydrofoil Mystery

Trapped in Ice

Camp X

Royal Ransom

Run

Camp 30

Elixir

Shattered

Camp X: Fool’s Gold

Sketches

The Pole

The Falls

Voyageur

Black and White

Wounded

Camp X: Shell Shocked

CAMP X

TROUBLE IN

PARADISE

ERIC WALTERS

PUFFIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published 2010

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright © Eric Walters, 2010

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request to the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-14-317469-1

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TROUBLE IN

PARADISE

CHAPTER ONE

“QUIET, PLEASE
!” Miss Hilroy yelled.

The noise level in the classroom dropped, but it was still far from quiet. The boys at the back—a pack of seven—pretended they hadn’t heard her.

“Now!” she screamed as she slammed the yardstick against the top of her desk.

That shut everybody up, although I was pretty sure that if Miss Hilroy didn’t start to use that yardstick on a couple of those boys’ palms, it would soon have no more effect than her voice. Then again, she was so old and frail I wasn’t sure a hit from her would even leave a mark.

“That’s better,” she said. “We have a few minutes left before the end of our day—the end of our week—and I want to use that time productively.”

“Mr. Hutton always let us slack off for the last few minutes of the day,” one of the boys said.

“Mr. Hutton was
my
student before he was
your
teacher, and as I recall from his marks, I am not surprised that he advocated slacking off,” she said. “And further, he is no longer your teacher, and as long as I’m in charge, you shall do as
I
say.”

She was trying to sound forceful, but instead her voice squeaked over the last few words. It wasn’t her fault. She stood no more than five feet tall and weighed less than a hundred pounds, and I didn’t even want to hazard a guess as to her age. From what I’d heard, she’d been a teacher here practically forever before she retired—which was a long time ago—and had been pressed back into service when Mr. Hutton was summoned to become part of the Bermuda Home Guard.

There was some snickering from the back of the room, and I heard a hint of somebody imitating her voice. Miss Hilroy, who was as deaf as she was old, didn’t hear a thing, and everybody else in the class pretended not to hear her being mocked.

“I thought that for the newest member of our class—joining eight others from off-island this year—we should take some time to learn a little bit of Bermuda history,” she continued.

“She should know everything about it—she’s
been
here for practically all of it,” somebody muttered from the back.

“I’m sorry, could you repeat what you said?” she asked. “I’m a little hard of hearing.”

“I said that would be rather a bore for the rest of us who already know Bermuda, don’t you think?” one of the boys, Phillip, said.

“Yes, perhaps you could provide them with private tutelage,” his friend Thomas added.

We were all wearing the same uniform—grey flannel pants, white dress shirt, blue blazer and school tie, and pretty much the same for the girls, except with a skirt—so it was hard to tell these guys apart, but Phillip and Thomas had already made an impression on me, a smart-alecky one. Both of them had
very
formal British accents—much stronger than the local Bermudian accent. And not only did they like to talk, they liked to use big fancy words and to pronounce normal words in a fancy way. When I said “privacy” with a long
i
sound like in “pirate,” they laughed and said it was “pr
i
vacy” with a short
i
like in “principal.”

They were both annoying show-offs. Plus, they were two of the other seven students who were new to the school, like me, so I didn’t know why they thought they knew so much about Bermuda. They’d been sent here from their homes in England to avoid the Nazi bombing, the Blitz. If there were seven in my class, then there must be dozens more spread throughout the school. Some had come with
their families—at least their mothers and siblings—and others had been shipped over to live with strangers. That would have been hard.

I already knew a thing or two about Bermuda. Not being a big fan of surprises, as soon as I’d found out we were going to be coming here, I’d looked it up in the encyclopedia at school. Bermuda was a British territory, ruled by a governor appointed by the king of England. Most of the people I’d met so far had British backgrounds, which I guess explained the accents. Although Bermuda seemed like some kind of island paradise, it wasn’t really remote, being not that far from the United States, off the coast of North Carolina.

“Well, then, perhaps, rather than telling our newest classmate about Bermuda, our very newest classmate could tell us all about himself,” she suggested.

There was a chorus of groans. I would have groaned myself if she hadn’t been looking straight at me.

“Please, George, tell us about yourself.”

“Um … there isn’t much to tell,” I mumbled.

“Please, come to the front.”

Reluctantly, I got to my feet and went to the front of the class.

“My name is George,” I said.

“Please, louder,” she said.

“My name is George!” I said in my loudest indoor voice.

“Please state your
last
name, and speak more clearly,” Miss Hilroy said. “There’s nothing to be nervous about.”

Yes there was. Standing in front of a group of people and talking was about the most terrifying experience in the world, which, of course, was strange considering what I’d already faced in my life.

“Tell you what, we’ll make it as though you’re talking on the wireless,” she said, adding gleefully, “Isn’t it wonderful that we have a wireless radio station now?”

Bermuda had just gotten its first radio station—it was because of the war and the need to communicate with everybody if there was an emergency.

“I’ll ask you questions and you provide the answers,” she said. “That should be good fun!”

We obviously had different ideas of fun.

“So, George, begin with your name, age and siblings, if any.”

“Yes, ma’am. My name is George Braun and I’m twelve. My brother, Jack, is fifteen and he goes to this school, too. My family moved here ten days ago.”

“Where did your family move from?” Miss Hilroy asked.

“We’re Canadians. We lived on a farm in Ontario—”

“A farm … that explains the smell of manure,” Phillip said, and some of the others chuckled.

I felt my fingers start to ball into fists. I should just let it pass and—One of the boys made a low mooing sound and a second snorted like a pig.

“That’s
so
funny,” I said sarcastically. “I’m glad the boys at the back know their animal sounds … although making little comments when I’m not looking directly at you might mean you should make a chicken sound instead.”

I stared right at Phillip and the smile was wiped off his face.

“We moved closer to the action, not away from it,” I went on. Bermuda wasn’t like the front lines in Europe, but planes did refuel here, and there were U-boats out there somewhere in the Atlantic. “Any of you have anything you want to add?” I asked, looking from one to the other. They all looked down at the ground.

After everything I’d been through, I wasn’t about to take any back talk from a bunch of seventh-grade snobs. The best way to handle bullies was to stare them down.

“I’m sorry, George, I don’t understand what you’re saying … could you speak up?” Miss Hilroy asked.

“I was just asking if the gentlemen at the back of the room had any questions, but they appear to have nothing more to say,” I said.

“Oh, good, but if there
are
any questions, please raise your hand. And what was the reason for your family coming to our island?”

“We’re here in Bermuda now because my father was reassigned. He was with the St. Patrick’s division, chasing
Rommel across North Africa. He’s a captain and received medals for bravery, and he was wounded in action.”

Nobody had any smart-aleck comment to that one.

“You must be very proud of him,” Miss Hilroy said.

“We’re all proud of him. He’s been stationed here as part of the defence of the harbour, and my mother is also helping out with the war effort. She’s working in Hamilton with the Department of Censorship.”

“So both your parents are making contributions to the war effort,” she said.

“Yes” was my simple reply. What I wanted to say—but of course never would, because for one thing I was sworn to silence under the Official Secrets Act—was that both my brother and I had fought Nazi spies in Canada, and that we weren’t just a couple of stupid kids sitting at the back of a class making dumb remarks. We’d done things to save lives. We’d done things that had cost the lives of Nazis … done them personally. Not only could I not tell them that, I didn’t even want to think about it. It had already cost me enough sleep.

“Thank you, George, for telling us a bit more about your family. It is now three o’clock and time for dismissal,” Miss Hilroy announced.

The class came alive with noise as kids started talking and laughing, gathering up their things and heading quickly to the doors. I felt pretty happy myself. It was
Friday, I’d made it through my first week, and Dad was going to be home on a two-day pass. The room quickly began to empty. I wasn’t in a hurry. It was better to just let those boys leave. No point in pushing harder—although part of me wondered if they might be waiting for me outside. Seven to one wasn’t the best odds, but I’d faced worse.