Alan Turing: The Enigma (7 page)

Much happier was the new home in Hertfordshire, to which the boys
went for the rest of the summer. It was the Georgian red-brick rectory at Watton-at-Stone, seat of the old Archdeacon Rollo Meyer, a charming and mellow man whose environment was that of the rose-bed and the tennis court, rather than the well-scrubbed, brisk discipline of the Wards. John and Alan both responded with joy, John to girls on the tennis court (he being fifteen and decidedly interested), Alan to being left alone, allowed to cycle in the woods and make his own mess as he pleased as long as he met minimum standards in the house. Alan’s standing also went up in Mrs Meyer’s eyes when a gypsy fortune teller at the church fête said that he would be a genius.

The Meyers’ guardianship was shortlived, for Mr Turing suddenly decided to resign from the Indian Civil Service. He was angry at his rival, a certain Campbell who had come out with him in 1896 and had obtained a lower grade in the entrance examination, being promoted to be Chief Secretary to the Madras Government. So he abandoned his own chances of further advancement, and Alan’s parents never returned as Sir Julius and Lady Turing,
^*
though they had the more tangible benefit of a £1000 per annum pension.

It was not a return to England, for Alan’s father adopted a new role as tax exile. The Inland Revenue allowed him to escape the income tax if he spent only six weeks in the United Kingdom each year, so the Turings installed themselves in the French resort of Dinard, opposite St Malo on the Brittany coast. Henceforward the boys were to travel to France for Christmas and Easter vacations, while the parents would come to England for the summer.

Technically, Mr Turing did not resign until 12 July 1926, and in the meantime he was on leave, the development of Madras somehow continuing without him. But he lost no time in establishing a new sense of economy. Mrs Turing had to submit accounts detailing the housekeeping expenses to the centime. Holidays in St Moritz and Scotland were declared henceforth out of the question.

In many ways his premature retirement was a disaster. Both sons felt it was a mistake. Alan was to imitate in a particularly droll manner the huffy comments that his father would pass on ‘XYZ Campbell’, and his brother later wrote:
¹⁰

I doubt if I should have found my father an easy superior or subordinate for by all accounts he cared nothing for the hierarchy nor his own future in the Indian Civil Service and spoke his mind regardless of the consequences. One example will suffice. For a while he acted as principal private secretary to mild Lord Willingdon in the Madras Presidency and when a difference of opinion developed between them my father remarked ‘After all you are not the Government of India’. Such thumping, suicidal indiscretion one can but admire from a safe distance.

This particular
incident was always held against Mr Turing by his wife, the more so as she was particularly in awe of Lady Willingdon. The truth perhaps was that despite all the endless talk of duty, the qualities required in a district officer were very different from those of rule-book-keeping and deference to rank. Governing millions of people spread over an area equal to that of Wales called for an independent judgment and force of personality which were less welcome in the more courtly circles of metropolitan Madras. They were certainly little needed in his retirement, in which the busy intrigue of India assumed a retrospective appeal. His remaining years were dogged by a sense of loss, disillusion, and an intense boredom which fishing and bridge parties could never alleviate. He was aggravated by the fact that his younger wife found the return to Europe an opportunity to emerge from the constricting mental atmosphere of Dublin and Coonoor. For he had little regard for her more intellectual ambitions, combined as they were with a rather nervous, fussy domesticity; while she suffered from his obsessive penny-pinching and sense of being betrayed. They were both emotionally demanding, but neither met the other’s demands, and they came to communicate in little but planning the garden.

One result of the new arrangement was that Alan now saw some point to learning French, and it became Alan’s favourite school subject. But he also liked it as a sort of code, in which he naively wrote a postcard to his mother about ‘
la revolution
’ at Hazelhurst that Mr Darlington was not supposed to be able to read. (The joke was on their Breton maid at Dinard, who often spoke of a socialist revolution being imminent.)

But it was science that entranced him, as his parents discovered when they arrived back to find him clutching
Natural Wonders
. Their reaction was not entirely negative. Mrs Turing’s grandfather’s second cousin, George Johnstone Stoney (1826-1911), had been a famous Irish scientist whom she had once met as a girl in Dublin. He was best known as the inventor of the word ‘electron’ which he coined in 1894 before the atomicity of electric charge had been established. Mrs Turing was very proud of having a Fellow of the Royal Society in her family, for ranks and titles made a great impression upon her. She would also show Alan the picture of Pasteur on the French postage stamps, which suggested the prospect of Alan as a benefactor of humanity. Perhaps she recalled that doctor missionary in Kashmir, all those years ago! – but there was also the simple fact that although she herself pressed her ideas into a suitably ladylike form, she still represented the Stoneys who had married applied science to the expanding empire. Alan’s father, however, could well have pointed out that a scientist could expect no more than £500 a year, even in the Civil Service.

But he also helped Alan in his own way, for when back at school in May 1924 Alan wrote:

… You (Daddy) were telling me about surveying in the train, I have found out or rather read how they find out the heights of trees, widths of rivers, valley’s etc.
by a combination of both I found out how they find heights of mountains without climbing them.

Alan had also read about how to draw a geographical section, and had added this accomplishment to ‘family tree, chess, maps etc. (gennerally my own amusements)’. In the summer of 1924 the family stayed for a time at Oxford – a nostalgic exercise on Mr Turing’s part – and then in September they holidayed at a boarding house in North Wales. The parents stayed on awhile when Alan went back by himself to Hazelhurst (‘I tipped the porter all right and the taxi too … I did not tip the Frant chap but that was not expected of me. Was it?’) where he made his own maps of the Snowdonia mountains. (‘Will you compare my map with the Ordnance one and send it back.’)

Maps were an old interest: family trees he also liked, and the particularly awkward Turing genealogy, with its leaps of the baronetcy from bough to bough and its enormous Victorian families, exercised his ingenuity. Chess was the most social of his activities:

There was not going to be any Chess Tournament because Mr Darlington had not seen many people playing but he said that if I asked everyone who could play and made a list of everyone who had played this term we would have it. I managed to get enough people so we are having it.

He also found the work in class lb to be ‘much more interesting’. But all this paled before chemistry. Alan had always liked recipes, strange brews, and patent inks, and had tried clay-firing in the wood when staying with the Meyers. The idea of chemical processes would not have been strange to him. And in the summer holidays at Oxford, his parents had allowed him to play with a box of chemicals for the first time.

Natural Wonders
did not have much to say about chemistry, except in terms of poisons. A strong defence of Temperance, not to say Prohibition, flowed from Brewster’s scientific pen:

The life of any creature, man, animal or plant, is one long fight against being poisoned. The poisons get us in all sorts of ways … like alcohol, ether, chloroform, the various alkaloids, such as strychnin and atropin and cocain, which we use as medicines, and nicotin, which is the alkaloid of tobacco, the poisons of many toadstools, caffein which we get in tea and coffee. …

There was another section headed ‘Of Sugar and Other Poisons’, explaining the effect of carbon dioxide in the blood, causing fatigue, and the action of the brain:

When the nerve center in the neck tastes a little carbon dioxid, it doesn’t say anything. But the moment the taste begins to get strong (which is in less than a quarter minute after one starts running hard) it telephones over the nerves to the lungs:

‘Here, here, here! What is the matter with you fellows Get busy. Breathe hard. This blood is fairly sizzling with burnt up sugar!’

All this was grist to Alan’s mill, although at this point what interested him was the more sober claim that:

The carbon dioxid becomes in the blood ordinary cooking soda; the blood carries the soda to the lungs, and there it changes to carbon dioxid again, exactly as it does when, as cooking soda, or baking powder, you add it to flour and use it to raise cake.

There was nothing in
Natural Wonders
to explain chemical names or chemical change, but he must have picked up the ideas from somewhere else, for on arriving back at school on 21 September 1924 his letter reminded his parents ‘Don’t forget the science book I was to have instead of the Children’s Encyclopedia,’ and also:

In Natural wonders every child should know it says that the Carbon dioxide is changed to cooking soda in the blood and back to carbon dioxide in the lungs. If you can will you send me the chemical name of cooking soda or the formula better still so that I can see how it does it.

Presumably he had seen the
Children’s Encyclopedia
, if only to reject it as too childish and vague, and could well have learnt the basic ideas of chemistry from its multitude of little ‘experiments’ with household substances. The prophetic spark of enquiry lay in his trying to combine the ideas of chemical formulae on the one hand with the mechanistic description of the body on the other.

Chemistry was not the Turing parents’
forte
, but in November he found a more reliable source of information: ‘I have come into great luck here: there is an Encyclopedia that is 1st form property.’ And at Christmas 1924 he was given a set of chemicals, crucibles and test-tubes, and allowed to use them in the cellar of
Ker Sammy
, their villa in the Rue du Casino. He heaved great quantities of sea-weed back from the beach in order to extract a minute amount of iodine. This was much to the amazement of John, who with different eyes saw Dinard as an expatriate English colony of the bright 1920s, and spent his time on tennis, golf, dancing and flirting in the Casino.

There was an English schoolmaster in the neighbourhood, whom Alan’s parents employed to coach Alan for the Common Entrance examination, who found himself plied with questions about science. In March 1925, back at school, Alan wrote:

I came out in the same place in Common Entrance
^*
this term as last with 53% average. I got 69% in French.

But it was the chemistry that mattered:

I
wonder whether I could get an earthenware retort anywhere for some high-heat actions. I have been trying to learn some Organic Chemistry, when I began if I saw something like this

H(CH
₂
)
₁₇
CO
₂
H(CH
₂
)
₂
C

I would try and work it out like this C
₂₁
H
₄₀
O
₂
which might be all sorts of things it is a kind of oil. I find the Graphic formulae help too, thus Alcohol is

while Methyl ether HCH
₂
O CH
₂
H or C
₂
H
₆
O