Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges Page A

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 seenow 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 Brewster, 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.
    Besides watching the daisies, Alan liked inventing things. On 11 February 1923 he wrote: 9
    Dear Mother and Daddy,
I have got a lovely cinema kind of thing Micheal * sills gave it to me and you can draw new films for it and I am making a copy of it for you for an easter present I am sending it in another envelope if you want any more films for it write for them there are 16 pictures in each but I worked out that I could draw ‘The boy stood at the tea table’ you know the Rhyme made up from casabianca I was 2nd this week again. Matron sends her love GB said that as I wrote so thick I was to get some new nibs from T. Wells and I am writing with them now there is a lecture tomorrow Wainwright was next to bottom this week this is my patent ink
    There was nothing about science, inventions, or the modern world in the Common Entrance examination – the public school admission test, which was the raison d’être of schools like Hazelhurst. Casabianca was nearer themark. In the American Natural Wonders everything had to have a reason. But the British system was building different ‘thinking spots’ – the virtue of Casabianca, the boy on the burning deck, was that he carried out his instructions literally, losing his life in the process.
    The masters did their best to discourage Alan’s irrelevant interest in science, but could not stop his inventions – in particular, machines to help him in the writing problems that still plagued him:
    April 1 (fool’s day)
Guess what I am writing with. It is an invention of my own it is a fountain pen like this:— [crude diagram ] you see to fill it scweeze E [‘ squishy end of fountain pen filler ’] and let go and the ink is sucked up and it is full. I have arranged it so that when I press a little of the ink comes down but it keeps on getting clogged.
I wonder if John has seen Joan of Arc’s Statue yet coz it is