Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges

term of 1927. The headmaster commented more briskly:
     
He should do very well when he finds his métier ; but meanwhile he would do much better if he would try to do his best as a member of this school – he should have more esprit de corps .
    Alan was not what Brewster called a ‘proper boy’, whose instincts, inherited from thousands of years of warfare, made him want to throw things at other people. In this respect he was more like his father, who had managed to escape games as a boy in Bedford. Mr Turing, who lacked his wife’s excessive respect for schoolmasters, made a special request for Alan to be excused from cricket, and he was allowed by O’Hanlon to play golf instead. But he made himself ‘a drip’ by letting down his house contingent at the gym with his ‘slackness’. He was also called dirty , thanks to his rather dark, greasy complexion, and a perpetual rash of ink stains. Fountain pens still seemed to spurt ink whenever his clumsy hands came near them. His hair, which naturally fell forward, refused to lie down in the required direction; his shirt moved out of his trousers, his tie out of his stiff collar. He still seemed unable to work out which coat button corresponded to which buttonhole. On the Officers Training Corps parade on Friday afternoons, he stood out with cap askew, hunched shoulders, ill-fitting uniform with puttees like lampshades winding up his legs. All his characteristics lent themselves to easy mockery, especially his shy, hesitant, high-pitched voice – not exactly stuttering, but hesitating, as if waiting for some laborious process to translate his thoughts into the form of human speech.
    Mrs Turing saw the fulfilment of her worst fear, which was that Alan would not adapt to public school life. Nor was he the kind of boy who was unpopular in the house but pleased the masters in class. He failed there too. In his first term, he had been placed in a form called ‘the Shell’, with boys a year older than himself who were not good at the work. Then he was ‘promoted’, but only to the entrance form for those supposed of average ability. Alan took little notice. The masters streamed past – seventeen in those first four terms – and none understood the dreaming boy in a class of twenty-two. According to a classmate of the period: 17
     
he was the cruel butt of at least one master because he always managed to get ink on his collar so that the master could raise an easy laugh by saying ‘Ink on your collar again, Turing!’ A small and petty thing but it stuck in my mind as an example of how a sensitive and inoffensive boy … can have his life made hell at public school.
    Reports were issued twice a term, and the unopened envelopes would lie accusingly on the breakfast table, while Mr Turing ‘fortified himself with a couple of pipes and The Times.’ Alan would say, unconvincingly, ‘Daddyexpects school reports to be like after-dinner speeches,’ or ‘Daddy should see some of the other boys’ reports.’ But Daddy was not paying for the other boys, and was seeing the hard-won fees disappear without detectable effect.
    Daddy did not mind his divergences from conventional behaviour, or at least regarded them with an amused tolerance. In fact both John and Alan took after their father, all three believing in speaking their mind and applying their ideas with a determination punctuated by moments of recklessness. Within the family, the voice of public opinion was supplied by Mama, whose tastes and judgments were thought insipidly provincial by the others. It was she, not her husband nor John, who felt called upon to reform Alan. However, Mr Turing’s tolerance did not extend to the waste of a precious public school education. His finances were particularly tight at this point. He had finally tired of exile, and had taken a small house on the edge of Guildford in Surrey, but besides paying income tax he now had to launch John on a career. He had dissuaded his son from the