Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

by Andrew Hodges

  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 stuntman 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 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 dockleaf 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.

  But that December his parents steamed away and Alan was left again with the Wards, while John returned to Hazelhurst. Their father was transferred at last to the metropolis of Madras to serve in the Revenue Department, but Alan stagnated in the deathly ennui of St Leonards-on-Sea, concocting recipes. His development was so held back that he had not even learnt how to do long division by the time of his mother’s return in 1921, when he was nearly nine.

  His mother perceived him as changed from ‘extremely vivacious – even mercurial – making friends with everyone’ to being ‘unsociable and dreamy’. There was a wistful, withdrawn expression in photographs of his ten-year-old face. She took him away from St Leonards and, after a summer holiday in Brittany, somewhat spoilt by the constant counting of francs, she taught him herself in London, where he alarmed her by look
ing for iron filings in the gutter with a magnet. Mr Turing, who in May 1921 had again been promoted to be Secretary to the Madras Government Development Department, responsible for agriculture and commerce throughout the Presidency, returned once more in December and they all went to St Moritz, where Alan learnt to ski.

  Miss Taylor, the headmistress of St Michael’s, had said that Alan ‘had genius’, but this diagnosis was not allowed to modify the programme. In the new year of 1922, Alan was launched on the next stage of the process and was sent off to Hazelhurst like his brother.

  *

  Hazelhurst was a small establishment of thirty-six boys of ages from nine to thirteen, run by the headmaster Mr Darlington, a Mr Blenkins who taught mathematics, Miss Gillett who taught drawing and music of a Moody and Sankey variety, and the Matron. John had loved his time there, and now in his last term was head boy. His younger brother proved to be a thorn in the flesh, for Alan found the Hazelhurst regime a distraction. It ‘deprived him of his usual occupations,’ as his mother saw it. Now that the whole day was organised into classes, games and meal-times, he had but odd minutes in which to indulge his interests. He arrived with a craze for paper-folding, and when he had shown the other boys what to do, John found himself confronted everywhere with paper frogs and paper boats. Another humiliation followed when Alan’s passion for maps was discovered by Mr Darlington. This inspired him to set a geography test to the whole school, in which Alan came sixth, beating his brother, who found geography very boring. On another occasion Alan sat in the back row at a school concert, choking himself with laughter while John sang Land of Hope and Glory as a solo.

  John left Hazelhurst at Easter for Marlborough, his public school. In the summer, Mr Turing again took the family to Scotland, this time to Lochinver. Alan exercised his knowledge of maps on the mountain paths, and they fished in the loch, Alan now competing with John. The brothers had a good line in non-violent rivalry, as for instance when they played a game to alleviate the awfulness of their grandfather Stoney’s visits. This depended upon winning points by leading him on, or heading him away from one of his well-rehearsed club bore stories. And at Lochinver Alan defeated his family in what Mrs Turing considered the rather vulgar after-dinner sport of throwing discarded gooseberry skins as far as possible. Cleverly inflating them, he made them soar over the hedge.

  Life when off duty, in this early afternoon of the Empire, could be very agreeable. But in September his parents saw Alan back to Hazelhurst, and as they drove away in their taxi, Alan rushed back along the school drive with arms flung wide in pursuit. They had to bite their lips and sail away to Madras. Alan continued to maintain his detached view of the Hazelhurst regime. He gained average marks in class, and in turn held an unflattering view of the instruction. Mr Blenkins initiated his class into elementary algebra, and Alan reported to John, ‘He gave a quite false impression of what is meant by x.’

  Although he enjoyed the feeble little plays and debates, he hated and feared the gym class and the afternoon games. The boys played hockey in winter, and Alan later claimed that it was the necessity of avoiding the ball that had taught him to run fast. He did enjoy being linesman, judging precisely where the ball had crossed the line. In an end-of-term sing-song, the following couplet described him:

  Turing’s fond of the football field

  For geometric problems the touch-lines yield

  Later another verse had him ‘watching the daisies grow’ during hockey, an image which inspired his mother to a whimsical pencil sketch. And although intended as a joke against his dreamy passivity, there might have been a truth in the observation. For something new had happened.

  At the end of 1922, some unknown benefactor had given him a book, called Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know.8 Alan told his mother later that this book had opened his eyes to science. Indeed, it must have been the first time that he became conscious that such a kind of knowledge as ‘science’ existed. But more than that, it opened the book of life. If anything at all can be said to have influenced him, it was this book which, like so many new things, came from the United States.

  The book had first appeared in 1912 and its author, Edwin Tenney Brewster, had described it as

  … the first attempt to set before young readers some knowledge of certain loosely related but very modern topics, commonly grouped together under the name, General Physiology. It is, in short, an attempt to lead children of eight or ten, first to ask and then to answer, the question: What have I in common with other living things, and how do I differ from them? Incidentally, in addition, I have attempted to provide a foundation on which a perplexed but serious-minded parent can himself base an answer to several puzzling questions which all children ask – most especially to that most difficult of them all: By what process of becoming did I myself finally appear in this world?

  In other words, it was about sex and science, starting off with ‘How the Chicken got inside the Egg’, rambling through ‘Some Other Sorts of Eggs’ until arriving at ‘What Little Boys and Girls are Made Of’. Brewster quoted ‘the old nursery rhyme’ and said that:

  It has this much truth in it, that little boys and little girls are far from being alike, and it isn’t worth while trying to make either one over into the other.

  The precise nature of this difference was not revealed, and only after a skilful diversion on to the subject of the eggs of starfish and sea-urchins did Brewster eventually arrive back at the human body:

  So we are not built like a cement or a wooden house, but like a brick one. We are made of little living bricks. When we grow it is because these living bricks divide into half bricks, and then grow into whole ones again. But how they find out when and where to grow fast, and when and where to grow slowly, and when and where not to grow at all, is precisely what nobody has yet made the smallest beginning at finding out.

  The process of biological growth was the principal scientific theme of E. T. Brewster’s book. Yet science had no explanations, only descriptions. In fact on 1 October 1911, when Alan Turing’s ‘living bricks’ were first dividing and redividing, Professor D’Arcy Thompson was telling the British Association that ‘the ultimate problems of biology are as inscrutable as of old.’

  But equally inscrutable, Natural Wonders conspicuously failed to describe where the first cell in the human process came from, only dropping the elusive hint that ‘the egg itself arose by the splitting of still another cell which, of course, was part of the parent’s body.’ The secret was left for the ‘perplexed but serious-minded parent’ to explain. Mrs Turing’s way of dealing with the thorny topic was, in fact, highly consonant with Brewster’s, for John at least was the recipient at Hazelhurst of a special letter starting with the birds and the bees, and ending with instructions ‘not to go off the rails’. Presumably Alan was informed in the same way.

  In other ways, however, Natural Wonders was indeed ‘very modern’, and certainly no little ‘nature book’. It conveyed the idea that there had to be a reason for the way things were, and that the reason came not from God but from science. Long passages explained why little boys liked throwing things and little girls liked babies, and derived from the pattern of the living world the ideal of a Daddy to go out to work at the office and a Mama to stay at home. This picture of respectable American life was rather remote from the training of the sons of Indian civil servants, but more relevant to Alan was a picture of the brain:

  Do you see now why you have to go to school five hours a day, and sit on a hard seat studying still harder lessons, when you would much rather sneak off and go in swimming? It is so that you may build up these thinking spots in your brains…. We begin young, while the brain is still growing. With years and years of work and study, we slowly form the thinking spots over our left ears, which we are to use the rest of our days. When we are grown up, we can no more form new thinking places….

  So even school was justified by science. The old world of divine authority was reduced to a vague allusion in which B
rewster, having described evolution, said that ‘why it all happens or what it is all for’ was precisely ‘one of those things that no fellah can find out.’ Brewster’s living things were unequivocally machines:

  For, of course, the body is a machine. It is a vastly complex machine, many, many times more complicated than any machine ever made with hands; but still after all a machine. It has been likened to a steam engine. But that was before we knew as much about the way it works as we know now. It really is a gas engine; like the engine of an automobile, a motor boat, or a flying machine.

  Human beings were ‘more intelligent’ than the other animals, but were not accorded a mention of ‘soul’. The process of cellular division and differentiation was something no one had yet begun to understand – but there was no suggestion that it required the interference of angels. So if Alan was indeed ‘watching the daisies grow’, he could have been thinking that while it looked as though the daisy knew what to do, it really depended upon a system of cells working like a machine. And what about himself? How did he know what to do? There was plenty to dream about while the hockey ball whizzed past.