While to some degree people used the word 'childish' to rationalise their surprise at a person who actually said what he thought, with little decoration or concealment, there was also something quite specifically odd about his manner, which became more noticeable in his late thirties at Manchester.

A man with a quite powerful build, yet with the manners and movements of an 'undergraduate' or 'a boy', he was also disconcerting in his rapid changes of mood, between forcefulness and naivete, bristling with silent fury, but then breaking out in earnest charm.

It was an ambivalence with meanings at several different levels—an intellectual level in his refusal to be defined by his existing reputation, breaking instead into an entirely new sphere of work when approaching forty.

And of course it held an erotic meaning, part of his response to the situation of homosexual men in general, in which the roles of seeker and sought were more fluid and diffuse than in heterosexual relationships.

He had to keep moving; to keep on the go. These factors might indeed contribute a tension (though also a sheer fascination with life that others lost) as he became older.

But beyond these meanings the boyman quality of Alan Turing also reflected that most central question of his existence, one more special to himself.

He had not wanted to 'come of age' at twenty-one, and as it transpired, he just avoided seeing the age of forty-two. He had never wanted to take on the power of adulthood, although he did not shirk all of its commitments.