Joan Clarke ponders the enigma of Alan Turing

'Tardiness is inexcusable," Alan said, or words to that effect, when Joan appeared, red-cheeked and breathless at the place where she'd been directed to go after submitting a crossword puzzle in a newspaper challenge she'd spotted a week earlier. She'd meant to be on time, but things had gone wrong in a way that would be comical if they had happened to someone else. Thus when Joan did arrive at her destination, she bypassed the woman at the front desk from whom she would have otherwise asked directions and made a beeline for the room into which she'd glimpsed people vanishing a minute before...

... only to find her entrance blocked by two impatient men.

This room's for the candidates taking the exam, they'd insisted. One look at the skeptical faces surrounding her told her everything she needed to know - that she was apparently the lone woman who had been invited here, and now that she'd arrived, been mistaken for a member of the secretarial pool, an intruder best directed elsewhere so as not to interrupt the real candidates taking the test.

In other words: No girls allowed.

She'd certainly heard that before, though it was always more politely cloaked, but now their stipulation stunned her. Really, was there anything particularly masculine about doing crossword puzzles - a pastime she knew plenty of men and women engaged in while trapped in waiting rooms and on public transportation? She doubted it.

Now what to do? The two men showed no signs of permitting her to join the rest. After receiving the summons to appear here, she'd imagined all kinds of things - from the mundane to the sinister, but hadn't expected that it would be her gender that would eliminate her before she'd ever had a chance to sit down and put pen to paper. Still, having come this far, she wasn't about to back down, so she continued pleading her case to the pair of unsympathetic gatekeepers, until she noticed a pale-faced, rather gaunt figure making his way over to them.

He, too, wasn't pleased at her lateness, but at least he appeared to be a reasonable sort, and after a quick apology, she was able to take her place among the group being tested. There was occasionally a man in charge who was fair, who was prepared to judge on merits other than one's gender. They weren't common, but they did exist, and thankfully, there was one here to intervene.

At the time, she hadn't known who he was. It was later, after she'd passed the exam, handily out-classing the rest of the test takers, and been invited back that she learned his name.

Alan Turing. A mathematical prodigy, whose published paper she'd read, and who, despairing of the intellectual ants he was forced to work with (or more accurately, next to), had written directly to Winston Churchill and received permission to assemble his own team to crack the code of the Enigma, a German machine whose secrets were at present confounding the British, resulting in daily casualties and general demoralization as the war dragged on.

Though she hadn't known that part then.

"It's very...decorous," Alan solemnly informed her parents, when he'd appeared at her home to invite her to join the Bletchely team. Oblivious to social cues or not, he had at least grasped than decorum was key to winning them over. As he spelled out the particulars - many women already employed there, nice group of young ladies, available boarding and available activities to do in their company, Joan felt hopeful.

Alan might not understand the intricate dance of social interaction that most people took their grasp of for granted, but he had managed to decipher what had to be an essential requirement of any position she might take in her parents' eyes and bring it convincingly enough into the conversation for them both to take the possibility of her going to Bletchley Park seriously. And later, after some more discussion and promises on her part, to agree.

Sometimes stellar social skills weren't necessary to achieve your goal. Just plain persistence. Oh and a little politeness couldn't hurt either.

The other man at the head of the room lecturing the new arrivals was more the mold she had expected to be in charge: imposing and unsmiling in his pinstriped jacket. The Commander. He spoke at length about the absolute need for secrecy that every one involved must abide by, but the particulars of what their goal actually was remained hazy. Was everyone else already enlightened or was she the only one in the room still wondering? Well, what did she have to lose? It wasn't as if her new colleagues would be surprised if she said anything to reveal that she was still perplexed.

So she raised her hand and asked for clarification.

"What is it that we're here to do exactly?"

"Break an unbreakable Nazi code and win the war," came the gruff reply.

Well. That cleared that up. And the matter was urgent, a race against time. With the Germans sinking U-boats at a speed of roughly three per the length of a brief conversation, something was desperately needed to throw a spanner in the whole works. With the code being reset at midnight, hours of their labor was obliterated, their efforts as flimsy as child's sandcastle washed away by the ocean.

But Alan had the solution. Alan had managed to work out that this was no mere man (or woman) made task, but one only a machine could adequately perform.

It made sense. To her, but not anyone else on their team who considered the time Alan spent tinkering with his unwieldy (and costly) machine. And how he was to persuade them all, she honestly had no idea. No idea at all.

"Some men try flowers," she'd told him teasingly, when he'd pitched headfirst her open window (after tossing a handful of gravel at the pane to wake her), inky pages full of equations spilling from his hands onto the floor. He hadn't gotten the joke, of course, but she hadn't minded that. By now, she was used to Alan and his inability to understand humor - at least some forms. Instead of bantering back, he'd just gotten to his knees and began straightening out the papers, one inky forefinger pointing, then tracing the numbers. After a moment, she'd grasped the thread of what he was saying, could feel the gears of her own mind whir to life and begin revolving.

"I'm never going to be the wife you expect."

She'd suspected that Alan might not feel about her - well, exactly, the way one's fiancé was supposed to, but given what she wanted out of life, did that matter in the end? She didn't want a husband who'd expect nothing from her but clean clothes to put on in the morning, dinner when he got home from work, and children to kiss goodnight before bed. It was precisely for his intellect - and the way he respected her for hers that she loved him.

But he'd balked at having a marriage of convenience in the end, so that had been that. They'd stayed friends though. Not just colleagues. And despite his more maddening moments, friends like him were rare.

"Now if you wish you could have been normal, I can promise you I do not. The world is an infinitely better place precisely because you weren't ..." she'd told him once.

It was true. For they had triumphed eventually, cracked the Enigma code and saved countless lives. Even shortened the war. They'd gone their separate ways after it was over, keeping the work they had done in a shroud of secrecy, obeying the wishes of their boss.

Now Alan was dead. At the age of forty-one. Memories floated up, as she tried to absorb this.

The way his blue eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled.

The way he'd fashioned a crude engagement ring upon proposing.

The way they'd picnicked and upon seeing a daisy, engaged in a discussion of the Fibonacci numbers (rather than simply pluck them off like another beau she'd had while intoning she loves me, she loves me not...)

The way he'd attached his tea mug to the radiator when they'd worked at Bletchley, to deter theft - but perhaps also to have one less thing to keep track of, while engrossed in his work.

And she remembered something he had told her once when she'd asked why he had chosen to help her.

"Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine."

He'd also told her from whom he'd first heard those words - his schoolboy friend and crush, Christopher, who'd died unexpectedly over a term break without having disclosed that he'd been ill.

But as the saying went, it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Alan's legacy would live on. And thousands of people were the better for it.

Including her.

End