After the trouble starts on Bougainville and the soldiers arrive, only one white person stays behind on Matilda's island. Mr. Watts, whom the kids call Pop Eye, wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley, and he steps in to teach the children when there is no one else. His only lessons consist of reading from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr. Dickens. For Matilda, Dickens's hero Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun. Soon Mr. Watts's book begins to inflame the children's imaginations with dreams about Dickens's London and the larger world. But how will they answer when the soldiers demand to know: where is this man named Pip?