‘On the one hand, I could hardly take it seriously, the law as it stood at the time. I was contemptuous. This was a consenting matter, it caused no harm and I knew there was plenty of it about at every level, including that of my accusers. But of course, it was also devastating, for me and especially for my mother. Social disgrace. I was an object of public disgust. I’d broken the law and therefore I was a criminal and, as the authorities had considered for a long while, a security risk. From my war work, obviously, I knew a lot of secrets. It was that old recursive nonsense – the state makes a crime of what you do, what you are, then disowns you for being vulnerable to blackmail. The conventional view was that homosexuality was a revolting crime, a perversion of all that was good and a threat to the social order. But in certain enlightened, scientifically objective circles, it was a sickness and the sufferer shouldn’t be blamed. Fortunately, a cure was on hand. It was explained to me that if I pleaded or was found guilty, I could choose to be treated rather than punished. Regular injections of oestrogen. Chemical castration, so-called. I knew I wasn’t ill, but I decided to go for it. Not simply to stay out of prison. I was curious. I could rise above the whole business by regarding it as an experiment. What could a complex compound like a hormone do to a body and a mind? I’d make my own observations. Hard now, looking back, to feel the attraction of what I thought then. In those days I had a highly mechanistic view of what a person was. The body was a machine, an extraordinary one, and the mind I thought of mostly in terms of intelligence, which was best modelled by reference to chess or maths. Simplistic, but it was what I could work with.’
Once again, I was flattered that he should confide in me such intimate details, some of which I already knew. But I was also uneasy. I suspected that he was leading me somewhere. His sharp gaze made me feel stupid. In his voice, I thought I heard the faint remnants of that impatient, clipped tone familiar from wartime broadcasts. I belonged to a spoiled generation who had never known the threat of imminent invasion.
‘Then, people I knew, my good friend Nick Furbank chief among them, set about changing my mind. This was frivolous, they said. Not enough is known about the effects. You could get cancer. Your body will change radically. You might grow breasts. You could become severely depressed. I listened, resisted, but in the end, I came round. I pleaded guilty to avoid a trial, and refused the treatment. In retrospect, though it didn’t seem like it at the time, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. For all but two months of my year in Wandsworth, I had a cell to myself. Being cut off from experimental work, wet-bench stuff and all the usual obligations, I turned back to mathematics. Because of the war, quantum mechanics was moribund from neglect. There were some curious contradictions that I wanted to explore. I was interested in Paul Dirac’s work. Above all, I wanted to understand what quantum mechanics could teach computer science. Few interruptions, of course. Access to a few books. People from King’s and Manchester and elsewhere came to visit. My friends never let me down. As for the intelligence world, they had me where they wanted me and they left me alone. I was free! I did my best year’s work since we broke the Enigma code in ’41. Or since the computer logic papers I wrote in the mid-thirties. I even made some headway with the P versus NP problem, though it wasn’t formulated in those terms for another fifteen years. I was excited by Crick and Watson’s paper on the structure of DNA. I began to work on the first sketches that led eventually to winner-take-all DNA neural networks – the sort of thing that helped make Adam and Eve possible.’
It was while Turing was telling me about his first year after Wandsworth, how he cut loose from the National Physical Laboratory and the universities, and set up on his own that I felt my phone vibrating in my trouser pocket. An incoming text. Miranda, with the news. I longed to see it. But I had to ignore it.
