Alan Turing: The Enigma (5 page)

It was at Chatrapur, in the autumn of 1911, that their second son, the future Alan Turing, was conceived. At this obscure imperial station, a port on the eastern coast, the first cells divided, broke their symmetry, and separated head from heart. But he was not to be born in British India. His father arranged his second period of leave in 1912, and the Turings sailed
en famille
for England.

This passage from India was a journey into a world of crisis. Strikes, suffragettes, and near civil war in Ireland had changed political Britain. The National Insurance Act, the Official Secrets Act, and what Churchill called ‘the gigantic fleets and armies which impress and oppress the civilisation of our time,’ all marked the death of Victorian certainties and the extended role of the state. The substance of Christian doctrine had long evaporated, and the authority of science held greater sway. Yet even science was feeling a new uncertainty. And new technology, enormously expanding the means of expression and communication, had opened up what Whitman had eulogised as the
Years of the Modern
, in which no one knew what might happen next – whether a ‘divine general war’ or a ‘tremendous issuing forth against the idea of caste’.

But this conception of the modern world was not shared by the Turings, who were no dreamers of the World-City. Well insulated from the twentieth century, and unfamiliar even with modern Britain, they were content to make the best of what the nineteenth had offered them. Their second son, launched into an age of conflicts with which he would become helplessly entangled, was likewise to be sheltered for twenty years from the consequences of the world crisis.

He was born on 23 June 1912 in a nursing home in Paddington,
^*
and was baptised Alan Mathison Turing on 7 July. His father extended his leave until March 1913, the family spending the winter in Italy. He then returned to take up a new posting, but Mrs Turing stayed on with the two boys, Alan a babe in arms and John now four, until September 1913. Then she too departed. Mr Turing had decided that his sons were to stay in England, so as not to risk their delicate health in the heat of Madras. So Alan never saw the kind Indian servants, nor the bright colours of the East. It was in the bracing sea winds of the English Channel that his childhood was to be spent, in an exile from exile.

Mr Turing had farmed
out his sons with a retired Army couple, Colonel and Mrs Ward. They lived at St Leonards-on-Sea, the seaside town adjoining Hastings, in a large house called Baston Lodge just above the sea front. Across the road was the house of Sir Rider Haggard, the author of
King Solomon’s Mines
, and once, when Alan was older and dawdling along the gutter in his usual way, he found a diamond and sapphire ring belonging to Lady Haggard, who rewarded him with two shillings.

The Wards were
not
the sort of people who dropped diamond rings in the street. Colonel Ward, ultimately kindly, was remote and gruff as God the Father. Mrs Ward believed in bringing up boys to be real men. Yet there was a twinkle in her eye and both boys became fond of ‘Grannie’. In between lay Nanny Thompson, who ruled the nursery which was the boys’ proper place, and the governess of the schoolroom. There were other children in the house, for the Wards had no fewer than four daughters of their own, as well as another boy boarder. Later they also took in the Turing boys’ cousins, the three children of Major Kirwan. Alan was very fond of the Wards’ second daughter Hazel, but hated the youngest Joan, who was intermediate in age between him and John.

Both Turing boys disappointed Mrs Ward, for they scorned fighting and toy weapons, even model Dreadnoughts. Indeed, Mrs Ward wrote to Mrs Turing complaining that John was a bookworm, and Mrs Turing loyally wrote to John chiding him. Walks on the windswept promenade, picnics on the stony beach, games at children’s parties, and tea before a roaring fire in the nursery were the most that the Ward environment had to offer in the way of stimulation.

This was not home, but it had to do. The parents came to England as often as they could, but even when they did, that was not home either. When Mrs Turing returned in spring 1915, she took the boys into furnished and serviced rooms in St Leonards – gloomy places decorated by samplers embroidered with the more sacrificial kind of hymn. By this time Alan could talk, and proved himself the kind of little boy who could attract the attention of strangers with precocious, rather penetratingly high-pitched comments, but also a naughty and wilful one, in whom winning ways could rapidly give way to tantrums when he was thwarted. Experiment, as with planting his broken toy sailors in the ground, hoping they would grow afresh, was easily confused with naughtiness. Alan was slow to learn that indistinct line that separated initiative from disobedience and resisted the duties of his childhood. Late, untidy and cheeky, he had constant battles with his mother, Nanny and Mrs Ward.

Mrs Turing returned to India in the autumn of 1915, saying to Alan, ‘You’ll be a good boy, won’t you?’, to which Alan replied ‘Yes, but sometimes I shall forget!’ But this separation was only for six months, for in March 1916 Sahib and Memsahib together braved the U-boats, wearing lifebelts all the way from Suez to Southampton. Mr Turing took his family
for a holiday in the Western Highlands, where they stayed in an hotel at Kimelfort, and John was introduced to trout fishing. At the end of his leave, in August 1916, they decided not to risk travelling together again, but instead to separate for the next three-year period. Alan’s father returned to India, and his mother resumed a double exile at St Leonards.

The Great War had remarkably little direct impact on the Turing family. The year 1917, with the mechanised slaughter, the U-boat siege, the air raids, the appearance of America and the Russian revolution, set up the pattern which was to be the newborn generation’s inheritance. But it had no private meaning except in keeping Mrs Turing in England. John was packed off to a preparatory school called Hazelhurst near Tunbridge Wells in Kent in May of that year, and thereafter Mrs Turing had only Alan about her. Church-going was one of her favourite pastimes, and in St Leonards she adopted a certain very high Anglican church, where Alan was dragged every Sunday for the communion service. He did not like the incense, and called it ‘the church with the bad smells’. Mrs Turing also pressed on with her water-colours, for which she enjoyed a definite talent. She took Alan out on her sketching parties where, with big eyes and sailor hat, and with quaint expressions of his own like ‘quockling’ for the screech of seagulls, he delighted the lady art students.

Alan taught himself to read in about three weeks from a book called
Reading without Tears
. He was quicker, however, to recognise figures, and had an infuriating habit of stopping at every lamp post to identify its serial number. He was one of those many people without a natural sense of left and right, and he made a little red spot on his left thumb, which he called ‘the knowing spot’.

He would say that he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up – an ambition that would have been agreeable to the Turings, for his father would approve of the fees, and his mother of the distinguished clients and the practice of good works. But he could not learn to be a doctor on his own. It was time for some education. And so in the summer of 1918 Mrs Turing sent him to a private day school called St Michael’s, to learn Latin.

George Orwell, who was born nine years earlier but likewise to an ICS father, described himself
⁵
as from ‘what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle-class.’ Before the war, he wrote:

you were either a gentleman or not a gentleman, and if you were a gentleman you struggled to behave as such, whatever your income might be. … Probably the distinguishing mark of the upper-middle class was that its traditions were not to any extent commercial, but mainly military, official, and professional. People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the professions and the fighting services rather than into trade. Small boys used to count the plum stones
on their plates and foretell their destiny by chanting ‘Army, Navy, Church, Medicine, Law’.

The Turings were in this position. There was nothing grand about the life of their sons, except perhaps on the few Scottish holidays. Their luxuries were the cinema, the ice rink, and watching the stunt-man dive off the pier on a bicycle. But in the Ward establishment there was an incessant washing away of sins, washing away of smells, to distinguish them from the other children of the town. ‘I was very young, not much more than six,’ recalled Orwell, ‘when I first became aware of class-distinctions. Before that age my chief heroes had generally been working-class people, because they always seemed to do such interesting things, such as being fishermen and blacksmiths and bricklayers. … But it was not long before I was forbidden to play with the plumber’s children; they were “common” and I was told to keep away from them. This was snobbish, if you like, but it was also necessary, for middle-class people cannot afford to let their children grow up with vulgar accents.’

The Turings could afford very little, since even in the well paid ICS it was always necessary to save for the future. What they
had
to afford could be summed up in two words: public school. In this respect the war, the inflation, the talk of revolution changed nothing. The Turing boys had to go to public schools, and everything had to be subordinated to this demand. Never, indeed, would Mr Turing allow his sons to forget the debt they owed him for a public school education. Alan’s duty was to go through with the system without causing trouble, and in particular to learn Latin, which was required for entrance to a public school.

So as Germany collapsed, and the bitter armistice began, Alan was set to work on copy-books and Latin primers. He later told a joke against his own first exercise, in which he translated ‘the table’ as
omit mensa
because of the cryptic footnote ‘omit’ attached to the word ‘the’. He was not interested in Latin, and for that matter he had great difficulty in writing. His brain seemed barely coordinated with his hand. A whole decade of fighting with scratchy nibs and leaking fountain-pens was to begin, in which nothing he wrote was free from crossings-out, blots, and irregular script which veered from stilted to depraved.

But at this stage he was still the bright, jolly little boy. On Christmas visits to the Trustram Eves in Earls Court, his uncle Bertie liked making Alan the butt of his practical jokes because of his innocent giggly humour. These occasions were more of a trial for John, who was now considered to be responsible for his younger brother’s appearance and behaviour – a responsibility that no human being would ever lightly shoulder. To make matters worse, as John saw it,
⁶

he was dressed in sailor suits, according to the convention of the day (they suited him well); I know nothing in the whole range of the cussedness of inanimate
objects to compete with a sailor suit. Out of the boxes there erupted collars and ties and neckerchiefs and cummerbunds and oblong pieces of flannel with lengthy tapes attached; but how one put these pieces together, and in what order, was beyond the wit of man. Not that my brother cared a button – an apt phrase, many seemed to be off – for it was all the same thing to him which shoe was on which foot or that it was only three minutes to the fatal breakfast gong. Somehow or another I managed by skimping such trumpery details as Alan’s teeth, ears, etc, but I was exhausted by these nursery attentions and it was only when we were taken off to the pantomime that I was able to forget my fraternal cares. Even then Alan was quite a nuisance, complaining loudly of the scene of green dragons and other monsters in ‘Where the Rainbow Ends’. …

The Christmas pantomime was the high spot of the year, although Alan himself later recalled of Christmas ‘that as a small child I was quite unable to predict when it would fall, I didn’t even realise that it came at regular intervals.’ Back at dreary Baston Lodge, his head was buried in maps. He asked for an atlas as a birthday present and pored over it by the hour. He also liked recipes and formulae, and wrote down the ingredients for a dock-leaf concoction for the cure of nettle-stings. The only books he had were little nature-study notebooks, supplemented by his mother reading
The Pilgrim’s Progress
aloud. Once she cheated by leaving out a long theological dissertation, but that made him very cross. ‘You spoil the
whole thing
,’ he shouted, and ran up to his bedroom. Perhaps he was responding to the uncompromising note of Bunyan’s plain-speaking Englishman. But once the rules were agreed then they must be followed to the bitter end, without bending or cheating. His Nanny found the same when playing with him:
⁷

The thing that stands out most in my mind was his
integrity
and his
intelligence
for a child so young as he then was, also you couldn’t camouflage anything from him. I remember one day Alan and I playing together. I played so that he should win, but he spotted it. There was commotion for a few minutes. …

In February 1919, Mr Turing returned after three years’ separation. It was not easy for him to re-establish his authority with Alan, who had a good line in answering back. He told Alan once to untwist his boot-tongues. ‘They should be flat as a pancake,’ he said. ‘Pancakes are generally rolled up,’ piped back Alan. If Alan had an opinion, he said that he
knew
, or that he
always knew
; he always knew that the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden was not an apple but a plum. In the summer, Mr Turing took them for a holiday at Ullapool, in the far north-west of Scotland, this time a distinctly posh holiday, complete with gillie. While Mr Turing and John lured the trout, and Mrs Turing sketched the loch, Alan gambolled in the heather. He had the bright idea of gathering the wild bees’ honey for their picnic tea. As the bees buzzed past, he observed their flight-paths and by plotting the intersection point located the nest. The Turings were vividly impressed by this direction-finding, more than by the murky honey he retrieved.