He refused to participate in family board games, and when a television arrived he sent it back. At mealtimes they [Trevor-Roper's stepchildren] were required to sit silently, so as not to interrupt the adult conversation. They were discouraged from having other children to stay. Those few that did come reported that the atmosphere was tense and oppressive.
Trevor-Roper's marriage to Xandra, Earl Haig's daughter, would turn out to be durable and loving, but it also had its improbable aspects. She was highly-strung, impossibly demanding, imperious, thoroughly impractical and a woman whose emotional neediness seems to have been all but unfathomable. He, on the other hand (as he explained to her during one of their not infrequent quarrels), had been taught an extreme emotional reticence by parents whom he had never heard exchange "a word of affection". "I give my heart to you," he assured Xandra towards the beginning of their affair when she was still married to her first husband:
If you would take it without too many questions...then, by not raising too many difficulties, or knocking our heads against the brick walls, or rushing against the thorns, and by not insisting on detailed declarations which you must see that I have difficulty in expressing, we might have some happiness together without fruitlessly and endlessly discussing the terms of it...
The message, if understood, was not acted on, and their relationship was for long volatile. On one occasion, Trevor-Roper summoned his stepchildren to his study and announced: "I nearly left last night." Their response is not recorded.
It was the war that gave Trevor-Roper an exhilarating release from the constraints of his upbringing. At the outbreak of hostilities he had been called up into a department of MI8, the Radio Security Service. He intercepted enemy signals and enjoyed some success as a code-breaker. Later, he was transferred to the Security Service, most of whose officers he quickly came to despise as "boneheads". But it was thanks to this transfer that the wonderful opportunity fell into his lap of making a systematic study of the evidence surrounding the last days and ultimate fate of Hitler. The result was The Last Days of Hitler, an extraordinary popular success and a technical triumph that laid the foundations for his lucrative career as a public intellectual. But in retrospect, as Trevor-Roper himself hinted in a fragment of autobiography, the deep pleasure of those months after the end of hostilities had been in the accidental delights of the chase, not the formulation of the solution:
It was a fascinating piece of historical research — a fig for Archbishop Laud [the subject of Trevor-Roper's first book]; he never led me, or could have led me, on those delightful journeys, motoring through the deciduous golden groves of Schleswig-Holstein, and coming, on an evening when the sun had just set but the light had not yet gone, and the wild duck were out for their last flight over the darkening waters, to the great Danish castle of Ploen, gazing like a sentinel over those white autumnal lakes.
