Noah Barleywater Runs Away

Also by John Boyne

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Noah Barleywater left home in the early morning, before the sun rose, before the dogs woke, before the dew stopped falling on the fields.

He climbed out of bed and shuffled into the clothes he’d laid out the night before, holding his breath as he crept quietly downstairs. Three of the steps had a loud creak in them where the wood didn’t knit together correctly so he walked very softly on each one, desperate to make as little noise as possible.

In the hallway he took his coat off the hook but didn’t put his shoes on until he had already left the house. He walked down the laneway, opened the gate, went through and closed it again, treading as lightly as he could in case his parents heard the sound of the gravel crunching beneath his feet and came downstairs to investigate.

It was still dark at this hour and Noah had to squint to make out the road that twisted and turned up ahead. The growing light would allow him to sense
any danger that might be lurking in the shadows. When he got to the end of the first quarter-mile, at just that point where he could turn round one last time and still make out his home in the distance, he stared at the smoke rising from the chimney that stretched upwards from the kitchen fireplace and thought of his family inside, all safely tucked up in their beds, unaware that he was leaving them for ever. And despite himself, he felt a little sad.

Am I doing the right thing?
he wondered, a great blanket of happy memories trying to break through and smother the fresher, sadder ones.

But he had no choice. He couldn’t bear to stay any longer. No one could blame him for that, surely. Anyway, it was probably best that he went out to make his own way in the world. After all, he was already eight years old and the truth was, he hadn’t really done anything with his life so far.

A boy in his class, Charlie Charlton, had appeared in the local newspaper when he was only seven, because the Queen had come to open a day centre for all the grannies and grandads in the village, and he had been chosen to hand her a bunch of flowers and say,
We’re SO delighted you could make the journey, ma’am
. A photograph had been taken where Charlie was grinning like the Cheshire cat as he presented the bouquet, and the Queen wore an expression that suggested she had smelled something funny but was far too well-brought-up to
comment on it; he’d seen that expression on the Queen’s face before and it always made him giggle. The photo had been placed on the school notice board the following day and had remained there until someone –
not
Noah – had drawn a moustache on Her Majesty’s face and written some rude words in a speech bubble coming out of her mouth that nearly gave the headmaster, Mr Tushingham, a stroke.

The whole thing had caused a terrible scandal, but at least Charlie Charlton had got his face in the papers and been the toast of the schoolyard for a few days. What had Noah ever done with his life to compare with that? Nothing. Why, only a few days before he’d tried to make a list of all his achievements, and this is what he’d come up with:

Five achievements at eight years of age
, he thought at the time, shaking his head and pressing the tip of his pencil to his tongue even though his teacher,
Miss Bright, screamed whenever anyone did that and said they would get lead poisoning.
That’s one achievement for every …
He thought about it and did a series of quick calculations on a bit of scrap paper.
One achievement for every one year, seven months and six days. Not very impressive at all.

He tried to tell himself that this was the reason he was leaving home, because it seemed a lot more adventurous than the real reason, which was something he didn’t want to think about. Not this early in the morning anyway.

And so here he was, out on his own, a young soldier on his way to battle. He turned round, thinking to himself,
That’s it! I’ll never see that house again now!
and continued on his way, strolling along with the air of a man who knows that, come the next election, there’s every chance he will be elected mayor. It was important to look confident – he realized that very early on. After all, there was a terrible tendency among adults to look at children travelling alone as if they were planning a crime of some sort. None of them ever thought that it might just be a young chap on his way to see the world and have a great adventure. They were so small-minded, grown-ups. That was one of their many problems.

I must always be looking ahead as if I’m expecting to see someone I know
, he told himself.
Behave like a person with a destination in mind, then there’s less chance of my being stopped or asked my business. When I see people
, he thought,
I’ll pick up the pace a little, as if I’m
in a terrible hurry and am sure to be beaten black and blue if I don’t get where I’m going when I’m supposed to be there.

It wasn’t long before he reached the first village, and by the time he got there he was starting to feel a little hungry as he hadn’t had anything to eat since the night before. The smell of eggs and bacon spilled out from the open windows of the houses that ran up and down the streets. He licked his lips and looked at the windowsills. In the books he had read, grown-ups often left pies and cakes there with steam rising out of their peaked pastry hats, just so ravenous boys like him could come along and steal them away. But no one seemed to be that stupid in the first village. Or maybe they just hadn’t read the same books as he had.

But then, a stroke of good luck! An apple tree appeared before him. It hadn’t been there a moment before – at least he hadn’t noticed it – but here it was now, standing tall and proud in the early morning breeze, its branches weighed down with shiny green apples. He pulled up short and grinned, delighted by his discovery, because he loved apples so much, his mother always said that one day, if he wasn’t careful, he would turn into an apple. (And that would
definitely
get his name in the papers.)

Breakfast!
he thought, running forward, but as he did so, one of the branches of the tree – the one that had been leaning most towards him – seemed
to rise up a little and press itself closer to the trunk, as if somehow it knew that he’d been planning on stealing one of its treasures.

‘How extraordinary!’ said Noah, hesitating for a moment before stepping forward again.

This time the tree made a great grunting sound – a similar noise to the one his father always made when he was reading the newspaper and Noah kept bothering him to come outside and play football – and if he hadn’t known any better, he could have sworn that the tree was edging its way to the left, moving away from him, its branches pressing even tighter to the trunk now, its apples trembling a little in fright.

‘But it can’t be,’ he decided, shaking his head. ‘Trees don’t move. And apples
certainly
don’t tremble.’

And yet it
was
moving. It was most certainly moving. It even seemed to be speaking to him. But what was it saying? A quiet voice whispering beneath the bark … 
‘No, no, please, no, don’t, I beg of you, no, no …’