It was Alec Waugh's accusation that Sherborne provided a training in – metaphorically speaking – using two halves of the brain independently. 'Thinking', or rather official thinking, went on in one hemisphere, and ordinary life in the other. It was not hypocrisy: it was that no one in his senses would confuse the two worlds. It worked very well, and only went wrong when something happened to bridge the gap. Then, as Waugh said with some feeling, the real crime was to be found out.

In 1927 the school had changed somewhat in its unofficial conventions. When the boys read The Loom of Youth (as of course they did, because it was forbidden) they were rather surprised at the tolerance shown, or at least suggested, of sexual friendships. When the games teams met their counterparts from other public schools, they were amazed at the latitude allowed at the rival establishments. Sherborne boys were at this period asserting a more puritanical, less cynical orthodoxy than that of Alec Waugh's 1914. Nowell Smith was no longer appealing to the independent boys to stamp out what he called 'filth'. But he had not prevented the chemical messages from flowing in four hundred budding 'living apothecary shops', and not even the cold baths had put a stop to 'dirty talk'.

Alan Turing was a boy of independent character, but this subject presented him with a problem which was the opposite of the headmaster's. To most boys 'scandal' would be a quickly-forgotten bantering, alleviating the monotony of school. But to him, it touched the centre of life itself. For although he had surely learnt by now about the birds and the bees, his heart was to be elsewhere. The secret of how the babies were born was hidden well, but everyone knew there was a secret. He, however, had been made aware by Sherborne of a secret that in the outside world was not even supposed to exist. And it was his secret. For he was drawn by love and desire not only to 'the commonest in nature', but to his own sex.