Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (30 page)

This was Josephine’s third pregnancy since she had had TB. The first two were terminated on medical advice, but she refused to have a third abortion. Yet her doctor husband displayed scant concern when he left her languishing in the car. Nor was his behavior particularly surprising. Josephine knew before she married him that this irrepressible young man was unlikely to be the most solicitous of husbands.

Josephine Cassel had first met Griffith Pugh in the mid-1920s, through her brother James, his best friend at Harrow. James Cassel, “the inkiest boy at Harrow,” was an extremely clever scholar who went on to get a first in physics at New College, Oxford, where Pugh managed only a poor third in law.

The source of the family’s money was Josephine’s great-uncle Sir Ernest Cassel, who had been one of Edward VII’s so-called “Jewish circle” of rich friends, which included Nathaniel Rothschild and Baron Maurice de Hirsch.
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Josephine’s father Felix, who married Lady Helen Grimston, daughter of the Earl of Verulam, inherited a portion of his uncle’s great wealth.

Brought up in the sumptuous Cassel family home near Luton in Bedfordshire, Josephine had a “handmaiden” to look after her every need from the age of six, and grew up mistakenly believing that she was rather tidy. The five Cassel children all had large allowances, wonderful clothes, luxurious holidays, and chauffeurs to drive them about. The food was exquisite, and the houseguests were fascinating. Often at loose ends during school vacations, Griffith Pugh became a frequent visitor, sometimes going with the Cassels in the summer to a villa rented by Felix each year at Cap Ferrat.

Josephine, known to all as Doey, was infatuated with Griffith by the time she was twelve. Indeed, in their own ways all the Cassel children became infatuated with him. Bold, forceful, vigorous—he was everything they were not. Entranced by his athleticism, his free-spirited nature, his adventurous optimism, they regularly followed him to Haldengütli in Switzerland where Doey idolized him as her lion-haired skiing hero.

Griffith began sleeping with Doey when she was nineteen and he was twenty-six, though he was never faithful to her. Like everyone else, he was charmed by her lovely looks and her childlike sweetness. Long-legged and delicate, like a gazelle or an exotic flower, she was a warm, gentle, yet effervescent character. More importantly, she was available, and he was a man who took his opportunities where he found them. He had already tried and failed to bed her elder sister, Hermione. “Mione never would,” he used to say to my brothers, never quite finishing the sentence, “but your mother . . .”

Griffith married Doey hastily a few days after the outbreak of war. In the summer of 1939, with war imminent, Doey’s twin brother Harold had been called up. Griffith was outside the age range of the call-up, but Harold—who was quite as enthralled by Griffith as his sister—volunteered him to serve as a doctor in his Bedfordshire Regiment. Two weeks before reporting for duty, the two young men hitchhiked down to Cap Ferrat to join the rest of the family at the marble-floored Villa Prima Vera.

There, sitting on the rocky private beach below the villa on a balmy Mediterranean evening, the air full of the scent of wild rosemary and the singing of cicadas, Griffith and Harold were filled with foreboding. Watching the sunset they discussed the generation of fine British men who had died in World War I, many without siring any offspring. Betraying the pervasive influence of eugenics, Griffith argued that strong, healthy men like themselves must not allow it to happen again. They must “leave something behind.” They made a pact that, in the event of war, they would marry and make their wives pregnant as quickly as possible. Griffith and Doey married four days after war was declared. Shortly afterward Harold married too. In sharp contrast, six days after Harold’s wedding, Doey’s eldest brother James climbed a Welsh mountain and shot himself on the summit, leaving an incomprehensible suicide note saying, “Sorry Pip.”

Doey became pregnant in 1940. An impecunious young man like Griffith could not, responsibly, have married a girl and made her pregnant before going off to war, leaving her with no means of support should something happen to him. But there was no such problem with Doey. In that sense, he married her because of her money. Much later, he admitted that his earnings as a junior doctor were not enough to support a wife, and in other circumstances he would not have married when he did.

Felix Cassel regarded Griffith as an “adventurer,” but did not feel he could object to the marriage. He was not alone in thinking that Griffith and Doey were not well suited. Griffith’s greatest enthusiasms—physically, scientifically, and intellectually—were the mountains and outdoor life. Exercise, however, made Doey feel ill. She loved art, literature, poetry, and music; with the exception of music, the arts were of marginal interest to her husband. Doey was beset by doubts about the frivolity of her existence, and longed to find a purpose in life, whereas Griffith’s positive nature found little room for doubts about himself or his mission in life. His main confidante, the perceptive Elsa Hauthal, sister of Lotto who had taught him to ski, sounded a note of warning when the relationship began: “Doey is charming, but I am not sure she will understand you, Griffith. Your natures are so completely different.”

When he was sent to the Middle East by the Royal Army Medical Corps, Griffith’s early letters to Doey were full of advice about the coming baby. He thought that she should breast-feed for at least six months and give the baby regular doses of cod liver oil. When, in September 1940, he received the news that he had a son, David, he was overjoyed. However, as time went on, his letters varied. When he was having a bad time, he wrote long, encouraging letters full of tender remarks. When things were going well, his letters became few and far between and full of stories about the wonderful time he was having—the picnics, the climbing, the Persian stallions—and showed scant interest in David or Doey.

It was while Griffith was at Cedars that Doey was at last compelled to face the tragic reality that David was handicapped. The connection between rubella and handicapped babies was not generally understood in the early 1940s, so there had been nothing to alert her to the problem.
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The truth dawned only gradually. David was her first baby, and it was tempting to cling to the idea that he was merely a slow developer. When she aired her doubts to Griffith, he brushed off her worries with optimistic comments—“Funny [that] D is so slow in beginning to speak. Gwladys [Pugh’s elder sister] told me I was the same.” His failure to ask questions gave Doey the impression that he did not want to learn anything negative about his son.

Two of Griffith’s sisters added to the pressure by insisting that their brother’s morale would be irretrievably damaged by the shock of hearing that David was mentally disabled. Doey was tormented with worry about whether to tell Griffith or not, and occasionally her doubts surfaced cryptically in her letters. In one she described a dream about a disembodied voice giving her a message: “Last night I dreamed about you . . . you said you were not happy . . . I said I would tell you about it in bed. Then a voice said very loud
don’t tell him don’t tell him,
on and on, until I woke up & I still heard it when I was awake. The silly thing is I can’t for the life of me think what it was I was supposed to be telling you . . .”
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A different man might have recognized a cry for help—but not Griffith.

Halfway through Griffith’s first season at Cedars, it had become inescapable that David was deaf and mute and his movements were jerky and unnatural. But Griffith, preoccupied with his ski patrols and his exciting research, was not disposed to worry about what was going on at home. Only when he was sent to take part in the Allied invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943, finding himself in mortal danger with men dying all around him, did his attitude change.

With heightened emotions he resumed writing the kind of letters he had written to Doey when he had first left home. He had simply refused to focus on the problem. On August 29, 1943, he admitted: “I have been worrying a little bit about David lately & should be glad of more news about him.”

But nothing prepared Griffith for the shock when, in September 1943, after an absence of three years, he saw David for the first time. He told my brother Simon, “I came home expecting to find my son and I found a creature quacking like a duck.” Cruel as they were, those words accurately conveyed the impact of the shock.

Griffith’s failure to respond to David was profoundly disappointing to Doey, who was fiercely protective of her son. David’s handicap drove a corrosive wedge into the fragile structure of their already-tenuous relationship. Their reunion was ruined.

Griffith remained in England working at the War Office for just a few weeks before being posted back to Cedars. There, once again, he was able to set aside the problem of his disabled son and resume his life of sport, adventure, and research. It was not until nine months later, in June 1944, that he acknowledged there were problems in a letter to Doey: “How different our experiences these four years, when we should have been sharing life together . . . I am afraid I wasn’t really very well when I was home in September & it must have been rather a shock to you to find me so vague. Next time it will be different.”
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But his words of apology were themselves “rather vague,” and did not confront the fact that he had been horrified and repelled by the sight of his disabled son.

In the 1940s it was a source of shame to have a mentally disabled child. Doey and Griffith had grown up at a time when mental deficiencies were thought to be inherited, and it was believed that unless “mental defectives” were locked away, they would “infect” the rest of society. In 1929, a government report argued that the “racial disaster of mental deficiency” could only be prevented if the “feeble-minded” were segregated into asylums and the sexes were kept apart so they could not procreate.
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It was not uncommon for families to commit their mentally or physically disabled children to asylums and keep their existence secret, to protect their other children from the stigma of association with a “defective” brother or sister. A disability like epilepsy was considered bad enough to merit such drastic treatment. Every specialist Doey consulted urged her to put David into an institution, but she was determined not to.

In the first few years after the war, Griffith had little time for home life. When in 1948 Doey was spirited away to the hospital with TB, he took on a nanny to look after Simon and me, but no nanny could be asked to look after our turbulent brother. The only solution that presented itself was the local mental hospital, Napsbury Asylum. Napsbury was a hangover from the past, full of poor souls, some mad, some with minor disabilities, who had been locked away and were likely to remain so for the rest of their lives.
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It was exactly the kind of harsh, inhumane institution that Doey had dreaded. In her absence Griffith formally committed David to Napsbury.

When she came out of the hospital, Doey was horrified and rushed to visit David at the asylum. He clung to her with a look of sheer desperation in his eyes and had to be dragged off screaming and crying when she left. It was an experience that haunted her for the rest of her life.

Because David had been committed by his father, Doey had to battle bureaucratic red tape to bring him home. Beneath the soft, gentle personality was a vein of steel that seldom showed itself except in adversity.

Home at last, David showed clear signs of damage. He had developed a great variety of nervous twitches and phobias, most commonly at mealtimes, when he would become deeply agitated until he was given his portion, suggesting that he had sometimes gone short of food. Any sign of preparations for a trip away from home would fling him into paroxysms of screaming and crying.

As a young child David had been assessed as “unteachable” by a succession of experts, and very little effort had been made to educate him. When he was nine, Doey arranged for the retired headmaster of a local boys’ school to come to our house every morning and engage in this apparently impossible task. Slowly and patiently, using his own methods, Mr. Watts taught David the rudimentary elements of reading and writing, partially releasing him from the prison of being unable to communicate or understand what was going on around him. Gradually, it became clear that he was very intelligent, though for many years he continued to be tempestuous and sometimes violent.

Looking after David and keeping her younger children safe from his violent outbursts were a formidable task for Doey, which she undertook stoically. Meanwhile, Griffith appeared to lack the emotional resources to cope with the situation and turned away, not just from David, but from family life as a whole. Taking no responsibility for David’s welfare, he did not develop any kind of relationship with him. Least of all did he apply his problem-solving mind to the task of helping David to develop. Throwing himself into his work, and mostly ignoring his children, he behaved much as if he were still the carefree bachelor of his youth. And his Himalayan expeditions gave him the opportunity to return to the outdoor adventures he had always loved most.

Doey, being a self-effacing character, felt herself partly to blame for Griffith’s poor reaction to David because of her failure to warn him in advance. She also felt a sense of guilt about marrying Griffith, despite knowing in her heart that she was not really his type, and knowing that he was marrying her mainly because of his ill-fated desire to father a son. Faced with the sad irony of the outcome, she, in sharp contrast to her husband, responded to her insecurities by dedicating her life to providing a good home for the family and looking after us as best she could. After all, for all his faults and failings, she still admired, loved, and respected her husband. And she sensed instinctively that, beneath the surface of Griffith’s abrasive character, lay repressed emotional needs he was hardly aware of himself.