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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 familyfor 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