Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (49 page)

They trained together for their Everest attempt for over a year, unlike the 1953 British team, who used the walk-in and the acclimatization period to get fit and formed most of their climbing partnerships during the expedition. Messner and Habeler also had the benefit of modern lightweight clothing, boots, crampons, and climbing equipment. Above all, they made full use of Pugh’s dictum that it was vital to drink 4 liters of water a day to maintain their climbing strength. “We must drink” was their constant mantra, and much of their time when they were not climbing was spent brewing endless cups of tea sweetened with sugar.
¹⁷

The methods they used for their superb breakthrough were remarkably similar to those Pugh had envisaged in 1959 when he suggested climbing Everest without oxygen to Hillary. He proposed that the attempt be made in two stages, with an oxygen party establishing a route to the top and putting in “all the intermediate camps.” The climbers without oxygen would then make their attempt carrying no loads.
¹⁸
However, Hillary rejected the idea.

Habeler and Messner achieved the summit on the back of a successful oxygen-assisted expedition using pre-established camps. When they made their final push for the summit, a Sherpa climbed in front of them for part of the way to tread down the fresh snow on the route so they would use less effort to climb. They carried no weight; on the South Summit, Habeler flung off his light rucksack, giving up all his equipment so that he could “climb unfettered.” Neither man left himself any margin for error. Both knew that they would probably die if they ran into difficulties—even minor ones. They embraced a level of risk that in 1953 would have been regarded as completely unacceptable by Sir John Hunt and his team.

Of all those who sought to ensure that Pugh’s achievements were recognized, the man who tried hardest was Michael Ward, whose tireless campaign to force Sir John Hunt to acknowledge Pugh’s contribution to the success on Everest made him unpopular with his fellow expedition members, who felt great loyalty for their former leader.

In 1978, after years of private criticism from Ward, Sir John Hunt published his autobiography, in which—twenty-five years after the event—he publicly admitted in print for the first, and only time, how much help he had received from Pugh: “He made a great contribution to the design of our clothing and equipment, the composition and balance of our diet and to the policy for the use of oxygen, as well as the principles of acclimatisation. All this had a powerful influence on my plans, and on our performance on the mountain.”
¹⁹

However, Michael Ward was not to be so easily satisfied. Wanting Hunt to make this admission in a wider public forum than his autobiography, Ward continued to pester and criticize him on and off for the next fifteen years.

Finally, in 1993, Hunt responded by including some words of praise for the Everest scientists in the new introduction he was writing for a paperback reprint of
The Ascent of Everest,
to mark the fortieth anniversary
.
Ever since then, Hunt has been credited, notably in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, for having paid “generous tribute” to Griffith Pugh.

Even so, as he had done on countless other occasions, Hunt chose words which carefully avoided giving credit to Pugh. “Today, forty years on,” he wrote, “I would again like to acknowledge the contributions made by a great many people
other than those who were on the mountain
. . . I wanted
the many people who did not go to Everest—
on whose help with money, equipment and expert advice we had so greatly depended—to know how much we had valued their help.” [Emphasis added.]

Pugh, of course, did go to Everest, and so was excluded from the praise that followed:

The part played by our scientific consultants was especially important. Their knowledge of the physiological problems of human activity and survival at high altitudes powerfully influenced the selection, manufacture and preparation of our equipment, clothing and food; their advice informed the overall planning of the expedition and decisions on the mountain.

Asked to comment on the draft of the passage, the editor of the
Alpine Journal
pointed out to Hunt that he had made no clear reference to the research carried out specifically to help the 1953 expedition. “You might make [the scientists’] contribution sound more dynamic,” she suggested. “After all, you did not really make use of scientific knowledge that already existed in a vacuum.” But Hunt made no change.

Later, in May of that year, Michael Ward—unappeased—tried again. He got up at the Royal Geographical Society in front of the Queen and a large, distinguished audience and made his very public protest about the “unsung hero of Everest,” stirring me to feel that one day I ought to try to write a book about my father’s life.

Epilogue

Expecting the Lion’s Share

While researching my father’s life, I was constantly aware that I knew very little about his character as a man. Since believing, as a teenager, that my father was neither fond of nor interested in me, and that he really didn’t want me around, I had shielded myself with a carapace of indifference toward him.

By refusing to think about him and refraining from having any feelings for him—not even positive dislike—I sought to exclude him from my emotional landscape, taking no interest in him or his life. He was just my remote, unsympathetic father who disapproved of me.

In 1993, at the Royal Geographical Society, when tears sprang into my eyes as I listened to Michael Ward making his speech about Griffith, it was hard to believe that I was actually feeling empathy for my father, toward whom I had supposed myself utterly indifferent.

Going back into education at nineteen, I went on to study for a degree and emerged from the University of Essex in 1970 with first-class honors in literature—a “useless subject,” according to Griffith, who consistently denigrated my efforts to revive my education. I suspected him of being jealous that my mother was supporting me financially. When he was told about my first, he announced, “Of course, it’s all due to me”—implying that what little diligence his daughter possessed must have been inherited from him rather than from my mother.

I was extremely fond of my mother, and after leaving home in my teens I would return to spend weekends at Hatching Green several times a year, always telling myself that I would be able to ignore my father. But Griffith found it consummately easy to penetrate my defenses, and, being a bit of a bully, he couldn’t resist doing so. In truth he didn’t need to say much to get me to rush off to my bedroom in tears. I was supersensitive to criticism from him. As the years went on, the frequency of my visits dwindled, only reviving after I was married and had children of my own.

In 1974 at the age of twenty-eight, I became engaged to James, whom I had met two years earlier. James followed convention by asking my father for permission to marry me. “Thank God someone’s going to take that old bag off our hands,” was Griffith’s encouraging reply. After dinner that evening, he decided that he and James should smoke a cigar together. Reaching for the special box he kept on the sideboard, he took out one of his expensive “Hoyo de Monterrey” Havana cigars for himself, but he did not offer one to James, instead turning to my brother and saying, “Oliver, go and fetch that old box of cigars I never smoke.”

Six months later, James and I were married in Chicago, where he had been posted for two years as part of his job. The ceremony was conducted by a judge at the civic center, with the judge’s two secretaries as witnesses. No friends or relations were present. My parents’ marriage had not presented me and my brothers with an attractive image of the married state, and I was the only one of the four of us to marry.

Over time, my father developed a certain sneaking respect for James, particularly after he became the chief executive of an “FTSE 100” company. But he could not resist commenting, “Of course, James has got where he’s got by being a nice chap,” implying that James owed his success not to talent or business acumen, but purely to being a likable, conventional fellow—the very opposite of Griffith himself.

Returning to England from Chicago in 1976, James and I settled in London. Our three daughters—Venetia, Lizzie, and Rosie—were born in quick succession between 1978 and 1981. My mother adored her grandchildren, and they loved her equally in return. As they grew older, James and I started going to Hatching Green more often on the weekends. Doey enjoyed taking the girls on country jaunts, and prepared all kinds of treats for them—specializing in forbidden delights like sweet chocolate drinks, which she would administer secretly with an air of great conspiracy.

Griffith spent no time with his grandchildren. He was simply a glowering presence in the background—a little envious, perhaps, of the attention my mother lavished on them. The girls themselves were completely fearless of their grandfather. They thought nothing of sneaking into his office, climbing onto his chair, and pretending to be him, infuriating him by muddling up his papers which lay around in apparent chaos, though he claimed to know exactly where everything was. They played on his stairlift and charged around the house, making a dreadful noise. When they heard him approaching—roaring his disapproval—they would skitter away to some far-off corner of the garden, giggling wildly, leaving him to reprimand the thin air. It helped that they knew he could never catch them since he was hampered by his crutches. They remember their grandfather as an “angry” but not a nasty person, grumpy but harmless, and I sometimes wondered if he wasn’t secretly amused by them.

I probably gave my father good reason to be antagonistic toward me. I loathed the way he treated my mother and always took her side against him. No doubt partly projecting my own negative view of him onto her, I felt that he had curtailed her life and used her merely as his meal ticket and housekeeper. As far as I could see, all she got in return for sacrificing her life to look after him were insults and faithlessness. He continued to pursue women right up until the age of eighty, when he was overheard on the telephone telling the brothel he was about to visit, “Give me that little Malaysian one.” A few minutes later he took his leave of us, saying that he was “just off to take a walk in Virginia Water,” a well-known nearby beauty spot.

Though I was forced to accept that my mother admired my father and regarded him as a significant scientist, I still believed that there was no love lost between them, and that she was trapped by her good nature in a stultifying, fruitless relationship. Longing to set her free from this prison, I tried my best to persuade her to leave him. She took no notice of my efforts, but my father realized that I wanted to prise my mother away from him, and it only worsened our relationship. I never questioned why my father was like he was, though my mother often remarked that Griffith had changed a great deal as he grew older.

Not until I read the letters that turned up in the suitcase at the Royal Geographical Society did I begin to realize that I had not understood the ties that held my mother and my father together, and even less did I understand his character. But, finally, for me, the key to a deeper understanding of my father’s complex, contradictory personality lay in what I discovered about his childhood. Looking back I recalled that when we were very young, Griffith had taken me and my brothers to a place that had played a defining role in forming his character as a boy—a place where he had once been truly happy.

In mid-1955, between his expeditions to Everest and Antarctica, when I was eight and my brothers David and Simon were fourteen and nine, my third brother, Oliver, was born. This event prompted a complete change in our father’s character. Suddenly, he became a doting parent. He was immensely affectionate and attentive toward Oliver as a baby, and he carried his third son off to Switzerland when he was still very young and taught him to ski. This had enormous significance for me and Simon, because our father had never taken us skiing. I became prone to unreasoning rages. I remember storming through our house, slamming doors, not knowing why I felt angry. I suppose I must have been jealous.

So enthused was Griffith by his newfound sense of fatherhood that in the year after Oliver was born, he took what for him was a remarkable step. For the first and only time in his life he organized our family holiday. Usually he had nothing to do with such matters, which were left entirely to my mother. But now, in the summer of 1956, he arranged a two-week visit to Wales, where we were to stay in a vacation apartment in the servants’ quarters of a large house called Rhos y Gilwen, in the midst of a country estate near the Pembrokeshire coast.

Simon and I found the house dark, dingy, and unfriendly. The apartment, way up in the eaves, was sparsely furnished and had electric lights that were hardly bright enough to read by. They flickered constantly—“because of buzzards on the lines,” the landlord explained. Outside, it always seemed to be raining. A heavy mist swirled around the house.

Having gone to all the trouble to bring us to Wales, Griffith spent no time at all with us while we were there; instead, he passed his days wandering around the countryside alone, lost in a private reverie. Our tired mother was fully occupied with looking after the one-year-old baby, cooking the meals, and snatching the odd rest in between.

Left entirely to our own devices, Simon and I passed most of our time indoors, playing board games and listening to scratchy records on an old gramophone. Just occasionally we ventured out into the dripping wet garden where we were intrigued by a formidably steep, heavily wooded ravine running close by one side of the house. But all the narrow paths leading down into its misty depths were blocked by fallen branches and thick wet undergrowth, and we never got to the bottom.

When I started researching my father’s life, the house and the ravine came back to haunt me.