In the spring vacation of 1951 Trevor-Roper set out on a walking holiday in Greece. The country was recovering from the bitter civil war which had ended in October 1949; few tourists yet visited it, or at least dared to stir outside Athens. The result was that he never met another foreigner. ‘It was heaven,’ he wrote. In one three-day trek he covered eighty miles: ‘the most terrible, but also the most wonderful walk,’ as he described it. ‘I rather like discomfort, and sleeping out-of-doors, or in peasants’ huts.’ He had an alarming experience in the Peloponnese town of Megalópoli, when his hotel bedroom was invaded at 3.00 a.m. by enraged soldiers who stabbed his mattress with their bayonets. They accused him of being a Communist spy—‘not for the first or the last time’, he reflected wryly, years later.
Trevor-Roper tried to persuade his friend Dawyck Haig1 to accompany him on this and other trips abroad. They had come to know each other in the late 1930s, when Haig had been an undergraduate at Christ Church, and Trevor-Roper a young don. Haig was always known as Dawyck (pronounced Doyick), after the courtesy title which he bore until, as the only son of the Field Marshal, he inherited his father’s earldom at the age of 9. After his capture by the Italians in the Western Desert in 1942, he was consigned to Colditz, where he was among the prominente, those well-connected prisoners whom the Germans had selected as potential hostages. After the war, he studied at Camberwell School of Art, where he was a pupil of Victor Pasmore, Lawrence Gowing, and William Coldstream. In the years after the war Trevor-Roper was a welcome guest at Bemersyde, Haig’s estate in the Scottish Borders, which had been presented to his father by a grateful nation in 1921. When Haig asked him to undertake the thorny task of editing the Field Marshal’s diaries, Trevor-Roper instead proposed Robert Blake, who thus became another regular visitor. For Trevor-Roper, Bemersyde was a haven, and Haig an ideal host. ‘There is no place that I visit with such pleasure, or leave with such regret,’ he wrote after a visit in the spring of 1950: ‘My dear Dawyck, infinite thanks: your house is the humanest place I know,—you make it so.’ In 1954, Trevor-Roper would marry Haig’s eldest sister, Lady Alexandra Howard-Johnston (1907–97), known as Xandra.
Christ Church, Oxford
My dear Dawyck,
I am of course disappointed that you can’t accompany me, if I can go, to Greece. It will be my loss. But after all (I say to myself, when I seek to rationalise these profound matters) why should you? You were never, I think, a classical scholar: you have never read Homer, that unforgettable poet (and a man who has never read Homer, according to Bagehot,1 ‘is like a man who has never seen the sea: there is a great object of which he is unaware’); so how can I expect you to sympathise with the desire I have to visit, before it is too late, those romantic templed shores, the shame I feel at never yet having visited them or proceeded from the intoxicating foretaste in Italy to the authentic feast beyond the Adriatic? Even so, do you feel no temptation? Do not even the broken rocks of Crete, which thrust themselves up in the background of El Greco’s early pictures—and sometimes, disguised as Spanish rocks, in his later pictures too—do not even these draw you thither? Evidently not. You prefer riding in point-to-points. Well, I must not demur:
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus
And witch the world with noble horsemanship2
is a respectable and traditional ambition, especially in the peerage; and therefore, although I now regard horses in general as superficially attractive but fundamentally dangerous creatures (and so am apprehensive of my most valued friends having much to do with them),1 I hope that you will nevertheless enjoy your springtime snorting headlong across the unperceived flowering countryside, and will be (since you avow this ambition) universally admired—always allowing me privately to admire you for other reasons—by the tweed-clad matrons, goggle-eyed maids, immobile massive farmers and sonorous bookmakers of three counties; and if—as cannot always be avoided—some unfortunate mishap should occur: if you should be impaled, like a shrike’s larder, on a blackthorn hedge, or plunged, like a dipped sheep, in a water-logged ditch, or deposited suddenly on the flat in a ludicrous and humiliating posture,—then I would console you in advance by reminding you of the profound observation of R. S. Surtees, when the Earl of Scamperdale lamented inconsolably the death, in a steeplechase, of his favourite and parasite: ‘When an Earl is in distress, comforters are seldom far to seek…’2 I, of course, undeterred by your choice, am still hoping to go—if necessary alone, if necessary for years—to Greece; so I, though willing enough, can hardly be among such possible comforters (of which anyway I hope you will have no need); but I will send you, from Sunium or Mycenae, a postcard of some romantic ruin crumbling desolately upon those ancient cliffs or among those pastoral solitudes, as a reminder of the injudiciousness of your choice.
You see, already after a fortnight of term, I am suffering from fugitive moods, from nostalgia for remote rivers and silent rural scenes—that disastrous emotion which has twice taken me to Iceland, but which cannot be exorcised. But all is well: you need have no alarm nor fear for my health or reason. These gentle emotions are, I must sadly admit, only half of my nature. Meanwhile the physical circulation of the blood is kept going by furious battles on every front,—war against the clergy at home, war against impertinent adversaries abroad, controversies in the learned journals, battles in the university, and of course deep and regular potations of exhilarating champagne and stupefying port. A few days ago I had just, by a dexterous manoeuvre, contrived to eject from this college an interfering popish monsignor, and had sealed his exclusion by legislative action, and so, as you can imagine, I was beginning sadly to apprehend that flatness in life which always follows total victory, when behold! the dull calm was happily broken by a foolish American judge publishing, in England, statements about me which my legal advisers (Mr Justice Blake and others) have assured me are libellous, damaging and actionable.1 What luck! at once an exhilarating whiff of life has ruffled again the rapidly stagnating pool: the quiet well-feathered nests of lawyers in the discreet legal lanes of WC1 and EC2 are all astir; sharply-worded ultimata are flying hither and thither through those cosy boskages; and the air above Chancery Lane is already thick with the musty odour of horsehair wigs wagged this way and that in learned, sententious altercation. The judge is in full retreat and I am obliging his publishers to recall all copies of the book from the book-sellers, to delay publication, and to make costly changes,—all of which will not of course save the residue of the book from being reviewed by me when it does come out. Naturally this is all very wearing to the health, but it is absolutely necessary to the morale. On my visits to Scotland I have learnt one phrase which I am prepared to teach to others: Nemo me impune lacessit.2
I have just re-read my last paragraph. How frightful you must think I am,—how frightful perhaps I really am! I am ashamed (momentarily, & in your presence) of these sudden deviations into aggression and bellicosity, these unseemly interruptions of a demure & scholarly life, which no doubt (if analysed by a highly-paid psychologist) would be shown to have a sinister and unfavourable significance. One day I must seek, by introspection (that delicious but dangerous adventure) to solve this problem, to exorcise this demon, of which you, I am sure, must gently disapprove. But alas, though I always intend to improve my character, I never do; & now it is indubitably too late. You must take me as I am—I am grateful to be taken at all—and if you, being unable, for good reasons, to leave—indeed why should you leave—your paradisiacal hermitage by the Tweed, will nevertheless still allow me sometimes to visit you there, then perhaps (apart from the perfect pleasure that I derive from it) your influence will correct or reduce these outrageous elements in my behaviour. Meanwhile I am reminded of you by a visit from Denys Dawnay1 who is staying with Roy Harrod.2 I missed him at Bemersyde when he was with you last summer and have greatly enjoyed meeting him here, though the spectacle of such physical frailty is almost terrifying to me and I cannot look upon it without apprehension. I suppose it is a sign of cowardice that I like people to look well and not to remind me quite so obviously of the precariousness of life & health!
I hope you are looking after yourself, and painting—which is a far safer & more suitable activity than horsemanship, about which—as you see—I have a slight phobia since my own accident. It is only a slight one, but I cannot altogether charm it away!
yours ever
Hugh