Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (17 page)

It was Griffith’s personal Cho Oyu diary that delivered the first serious challenge to my settled view of my father, for it revealed far more breadth and depth of human sympathy than I had ever given him credit for. His romantic enjoyment of nature, his thoughtfulness about the Sherpas and porters, the fine-grained, sympathetic observations of the local people, just did not fit with my image of his character. Not everyone on a Himalayan approach march would bother to record that he had “noticed a man who I thought was delousing his friend’s hair; on closer inspection it turned out he was removing grey hairs.” Nor would many hardened climbers have taken quite such a sentimental view of the mother of a young Sherpani, “pulling her daughter’s head cloth straight and fixing the slides holding her plaits & generally fussing over her just like an English mamma and her debutante daughter.”

Griffith’s diaries are full of charming encounters with Sherpa women who were seemingly very attracted to his striking red hair and often gave him gifts. On his way up to rejoin Shipton after his extended stay in Namche Bazar, Pugh sat down to rest under a wall in a grove of yew trees near the village of Thame. Soon: “A party of women appeared and gave me enough boiled potatoes to make a good lunch. They expressed interest in my red hair and beard; they then went back to their own lunch sitting in a ring round their basket of potatoes in the middle of the adjacent field which they had been hoeing and dunging.”
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Further on: “We fell in with the peasants carrying an enormous upright bundle of cattle fodder. Several groups of people passed . . . mostly carrying potatoes. One woman had her baby slung crosswise on her back in a wicker cradle. The baby was completely covered by a cloth. The woman let me lift up a corner and have a peep.”

Apart from his constant outward-looking desire to understand local people, I had never realised that my father also had a particular fondness for animals; his expedition diaries were punctuated with detailed observations about animals, both wild and domestic. The very quaintness of his observations was another puzzling quality I had not encountered before. When he was beginning his oxygen experiments at the village of Chule, he was particularly taken with the villagers’ yaks: “The yak are very handsome beasts with long black fur hanging down below their bellies & round their hooves. They are very agile and graceful in their movements and seem strangely sensitive, as though they understand human speech. In fact they seem almost human. They remind me of ladies in fur coats.”
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When, a while later, I read my father’s war diaries and letters home to his wife, sisters, and mother in England, these only served to strengthen my awareness that I had not understood his character.
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One of his palpable qualities, which elicited a sneaking admiration from me, was the sheer enthusiasm for life they revealed. The diaries and letters alike were so full of comments—like “I am having a splendid time here,” and “It’s a wonderful life”; and there were so many stories of “delightful interludes” and “entirely unexpected adventures”—that I found it impossible not to respond, a little, to such abundant joie de vivre.

Griffith’s war diaries, written when he was in his early thirties, revealed an easygoing, outward-looking young man, the type who can strike up a conversation with people on trains and end up being told their entire family history. Here was someone who made friends easily and always had a group of special “cronies” to keep him company—a man who threw himself into things, grasping every opportunity and extracting every possible ounce of pleasure from every new experience.

At one end of the spectrum of his delight in simple pleasures was a picnic in the summer of 1942. Griffith described sitting with a group of friends on a shaded marble seat in a beautiful garden in the foothills of the Alborz Mountains, just north of Tehran. Water from a limpid pool cascaded down over rocks into a lily pond against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains sparkling in the sun. It was “a truly romantic scene,” he enthused, and proceeded to tell my mother in England, where food was strictly rationed, exactly what they ate: “We had an excellent lunch with chicken & ham, Russian salad, peaches & cream, cherries, white wine & beer . . . After lunch I went climbing.”
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The Alborz Mountains struck him as being “just like the Alps . . . cool air, rushing torrents, green trees, precipitous crags.” His letter ended with the words: “Truly life is good.”

But it wasn’t only the obviously pleasant places that called forth a positive response. At the other end of the spectrum, in October 1941, Griffith was at Shuaiba Hospital Camp in the desert outside Basra—an “out of the way place where nothing happens, there is nowhere to go and only the desert to look at.”
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“Beset by flies” and consigned to a tent that had recently suffered a plague of scorpions, he was longing for the mountains. He did not have enough medical work to keep him busy, and was fed up with his dead-end job.

Yet before long he was regularly duck-shooting with friends at Lake Hawr al-Hammar, 90 miles northwest of the camp, going for long walks in search of archaeological remains, learning Farsi, undertaking a daily routine of ballet exercises adapted into his own special fitness program, and avidly reading from the parcels of books sent by his wife, Josephine. On top of all of his activities, he made strenuous efforts to ensure that his living quarters were as comfortable as possible, and was now claiming that living in a tent was really so enjoyable that he preferred it to being indoors:

Our tent is so comfortable now that I should hate to leave it for a building . . . The cement floor is covered with a blue & yellow mat & I have a lovely Turkmen rug as well. The walls are yellow & the ceiling white. When the cold weather came I had to get a rug for my camp bed, so I bought a black & white goat hair one, which is very decorative. In the evening we have two hurricane lamps and a table lamp burning. A large pan of glowing charcoal called a sigaree is placed in the centre of the tent & is wonderfully warm to sit by.
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Not being well read in the literary classics, Griffith used the opportunity of the war to catch up, although even the most compelling Shakespearean tragedy failed to overwhelm his abiding medical instincts: “Finished
Othello
—Desdemona’s death is all wrong medically. If she [was] unconscious after asphyxia, she would undoubtedly have lived.”
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Griffith’s zest for life was not merely reserved for leisure activities, but applied to work as well. When he arrived at a 600-bed reception center in Tehran to help with a typhus epidemic among Polish evacuees from Russian labor camps, who were being transported through Tehran on their way south, Pugh was immediately put in charge of an isolation unit with 208 patients.
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The hospital, which had been opened only ten days before Griffith arrived, was overwhelmed. Two-thirds of the patients were lying on the ground, still in their own clothes. Dressed in white overalls and gum boots, Griffith set about applying what he described as “simple general principles” of care, “securing beds, clothing, basic nursing and the essentials of treatment.” He clearly derived great satisfaction from the feeling that he was making a difference, his enthusiasm spilling over into his letters home: “It is marvellous how lives can be saved by the simple measures of providing food, care & comfort. I am losing very few cases now . . . do get hold of a book called
Rats, Lice and History
by Hans Zinser . . .”
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So stimulating was this experience that, on his own initiative, he carried out a systematic study of his patients, comparing different treatments, and wrote a paper to provide guidance for future epidemics. It was read by the consultant physician to the forces and led to Griffith being put in charge of establishing a new medical center at Meshed.

Griffith was always eager to share his enthusiasms, however mundane or prosaic. Briefly posted to Bombay, staying in digs infested with bedbugs, he kept the bugs off his camp bed by standing each leg in a tobacco tin full of paraffin. A letter giving chapter and verse went straight back to Josephine, who replied: “Thanks a million for letter about bedbugs, perspiration & lavatories . . . I couldn’t help laughing at your choice of subject. Still the letter was in keeping as a whole.”
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There were clearly moments when Griffith proved to be a little too independent-minded for the army, as demonstrated by his escape from the Nazi occupation of Greece, undertaken not because he had orders to escape, but because he considered it to be the right thing to do. A close shave with a court-martial on that occasion had no lasting effect on his response to orders he disagreed with. Forbidden to take a gun with him on the journey between Tehran and his new posting in Meshed, he flatly ignored his chief officer’s instructions: “I saw fit to disregard his order—after all, it is not him that is going on this 600-mile journey across the wildest country.”
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Rereading my father’s Cho Oyu diary with an open mind, I no longer felt convinced that all the difficulties Griffith had faced on Shipton’s expedition could be explained away simply by the defects in his personality. Many of his criticisms, welcome or not, seemed perfectly reasonable and proved well-founded. Taken together, my father’s diaries simply did not square with the self-centered, antisocial, one-track person I believed him to be. I consulted my brother Simon, who had transcribed the diaries from Griffith’s illegible handwriting, and found that he had responded in the same way as I had. The gregarious and life-loving man of the diaries seemed an entirely different person from the father we both knew.

11

All Possible Steps

John Hunt was released from his army job in Germany and began work in the Everest office at the RGS on October 9, 1952. The office was housed in the “Polar Room,” where the walls were covered with photographs of Captain Scott’s failed expedition to the South Pole in 1910–12. The preparations were already well under way. Charles Wylie, the secretary-organizer, was busy buying and shipping equipment and supplies, closely advised by Griffith Pugh; Peter Lloyd was assembling the oxygen apparatus; and Tom Bourdillon had been released from his scientific job to work with his father on improving the closed-circuit oxygen sets.

The new Everest leader was tall, wiry, and tough, with sandy-brown hair, a firm chin, a neatly trimmed mustache, and the typical clipped, upper-class accent of the Sandhurst army officer. Hunt wore his role as leader lightly. His manner was friendly and unassuming, and he had the habit of listening politely and attentively to people who wanted to advise him, looking directly into their eyes as he thanked them gravely for their help, even when he intended to ignore them.
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In the months before taking up his post, Hunt had been concerned that he was joining the expedition “very late in the day.” Although he had climbed in the Himalayas, he admitted to Basil Goodfellow that he was “not familiar with the problem of Everest,” which “will be a great handicap.”
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Before leaving Germany he had bombarded Wylie with requests for maps and texts about Everest as he attempted to get “quickly into the saddle.”

He freely admitted that he had no “scientific background” and knew little about the problems of climbing at extreme altitude, and nothing about oxygen. Unaware that the MRC had agreed to act as the scientific advisers, he wrote in September asking the Himalayan Committee to set up “one single scientific authority” to decide on the oxygen policy and other altitude issues.
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Wylie reassured him that “the MRC has taken on all our scientific problems,” and informed him—as did Goodfellow—of the commitment to take Pugh on the expedition.
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Pugh had been hard at work for over three months when Hunt finally arrived in London. One of his most important tasks had been to draw together all his Cho Oyu research findings into a final report—“The British Himalayan Expedition to Cho Oyu, 1952”—which would be central to the planning of the expedition.
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Before Hunt arrived, Pugh had received discreet support from Laurence Kirwan. Pugh wanted to supplement his analysis of the clothing and protective gear from Cho Oyu with a questionnaire completed by the climbers. Kirwan, realizing that his protégé might not have sufficient clout with the climbers to get a rapid response, arranged to send the questionnaire out under his own name.
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Kirwan also helped to arrange for Pugh to visit the Swiss.

When Kirwan first approached them, the Swiss reacted coolly, refusing to agree to a meeting. But in September they relented and Pugh made a four-day visit to Geneva, where his old-established contacts and his command of French and German helped win their cooperation.
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In exchange for sight of his Cho Oyu research, the Swiss gave Pugh detailed inventories of their clothing, equipment, and diet, along with written accounts of their experiences.
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This was extraordinarily generous in view of the years of frustration they had suffered while the British conspired to prevent them from attempting Everest.