Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (50 page)

Griffith’s younger sister—my aunt Ruth—had never mentioned Rhos y Gilwen to me. Only after I started questioning her about what she could remember of her brother as a boy did she tell me a little about it. It was the house where she and Griffith spent five years of their early childhood. Ruth remembered being left in Wales at the age of three, along with Griffith, age four, when their parents, who had come over from Calcutta for their customary summer visit to the home country, rushed back to India in the late summer of 1914 at the onset of World War I. My grandmother had elected to return to India with my grandfather, rather than remain at the rented Rhos y Gilwen with her two youngest children. “No one can look after your husband,” she explained in a letter to a friend, “but other people can look after your children.”

The war lasted longer than anyone expected, and my grandparents did not return to Wales until 1919, after it was over. At Rhos y Gilwen, as time passed, the servants, the cook, and the farmhands were either dismissed or left of their own accord to join the war effort. Eventually the only people left in the house were the two young children and their nanny—Nanny Saunders. Five miles from the nearest village, they were isolated from the outside world and only had each other for company.

For almost five years Nanny Saunders did not have a single day off, and she invariably sent Ruth and Griffith outside in their wooden clogs to occupy themselves. All day, almost every day, they ran wild in the garden and surrounding countryside, both developing a great love of nature and the outdoors. Their only schooling was a two-hour lesson twice a week with a woman who came in from the nearest village. Ruth remembered playing in the fields, snaring rabbits, running around the tops of the slate-capped walls enclosing the vegetable garden behind the house, and, on winter evenings, sitting on a sofa, reading, by a huge fire in the hall. She and Griffith became very close and very self-sufficient, sharing a private language and doing everything together. He called her “Baby.” She called him “Griffy,” and regarded him as “the fount of all knowledge.”

“Very thin with spindly legs, round blue eyes and fiery red hair,” Griffy was in sole charge of their outdoor lives. At five he was already very bossy, liked things done his own way, and was insatiably curious—“into everything,” as Ruth put it. One issue that caused arguments between them was that Griffy always wanted to go down into “the dingle”—the ravine next to the house—to do projects and experiments, and he wanted his sister on hand to help him. “We were guided by
The Scout Magazine,
and we learned to make fires and all that kind of thing,” he later recalled
.
But Ruth found the dingle dark and sinister and seldom wanted to go there.

Ruth adored her brother and was deeply traumatized when, at the age of nine and a half, he was suddenly sent away to boarding school, and she also had to leave Rhos y Gilwen after their parents gave up the lease on the house. It felt like she was being snatched away from the Garden of Eden. Nothing was ever quite as good again. Eventually she was taken to visit her brother at school, but she found him changed and aloof, and never regained her former closeness with him.

I do not remember my father ever mentioning Rhos y Gilwen to me in his lifetime. The first time I heard him talking of it was on video in 2004, when I was loaned a tape of Griffith being interviewed at the age of eighty by one of the Silver Hut scientists, Jim Milledge. Another former colleague, Ray Clark, was doing the filming.

Viewing the tape, what struck me most was my father’s transformation when he talked about his childhood. His voice softened, he chuckled with pleasure, and his face creased into smiles as he recalled his early years, running around the countryside at Rhos y Gilwen with his sister and playing in the dingle. “We were just turned loose in the morning and then we were summoned for lunch and then turned loose again,” he remembered delightedly.

There was no supervision of any kind, and just this sort of jungle. It was ideal for children . . . To get us back [Nanny] blew a bugle, and when we didn’t want to go back we used to tease her and say that, “Oh, we thought it was a cow” . . . This was a formative time in a child’s life when he is supposed to have all this discipline and we had none . . . no discipline whatever.

In 2006 I went there myself. Arriving up the tree-lined drive with dappled sunlight glinting through the leaves, I was amazed to find that the house was not the grim, unfriendly black hulk of my memory but a mellow, attractive building. At its front, wide lawns swept down to a ha-ha and meadows beyond, full of sheep and cattle. Inside, the rooms were light and well-proportioned. There was a central hall with a large fireplace and a sofa next to it where Griffith and Ruth must have sat, reading their books.

Walking around the estate I found myself picturing the two young children dashing about the fields and climbing the trees. The vegetable garden was still there behind the house, and I was shocked to see that the walls the two young children used to run along with such abandon were all of 12 feet high. It was only at this moment, when a succession of images of my father—not as my parent, but as an innocent young child racing around with his sister—crowded into my mind, that the thaw started. For the first time I began to gain a little emotional empathy for him as a person.

Lost in thought, I ventured into the dingle, setting off down a steep path to look for the mossy stream at its base. The dingle—a precipitous gash in the landscape, with ancient trees and banks of fantastical, entwined undergrowth disappearing into its invisible dark depths—proved to be a place so full of atmosphere that I was overtaken by a sense of trepidation. For years I had protected myself from being hurt by my father by keeping him out of my emotions. Now the realization that I was really beginning to penetrate the mysteries of his personality was making me fearful of how much it might hurt to allow him to exist in my mind as a sympathetic entity.

Nevertheless, I steeled myself and started to think about how his experiences in this place had helped to forge his character.

Griffith had emphasized that his life at Rhos y Gilwen had a complete absence of discipline. I think he recognized that in that lack of discipline lay the makings of the maverick adult who was never disposed to conform, and always resisted being told what to do—whether he came up against his army colonel, the long arm of the law, his boss Otto Edholm, or his MRC managers; whether he was dealing with the Alpine Club or the British Olympic Association. The only exceptions were people like Sir Charles Harington and Sir Peter Medawar, who commanded his natural respect.

Thrown back on their own resources as young children, Ruth and my father had to become very self-reliant. For five years he spent all day, every day, deciding exactly what was to be done, with no one but his little sister to say otherwise. Therein lay the roots of a man who, later, always did things in his own way and never worried about putting his head above the parapet or standing up against the conventional view. Being cared for in his youth by a nanny who made no demands on him, and, as a young adult and the only son, having money lavished on him by his absent parents—being brought up, as Doey put it, “always to expect the lion’s share”—must have encouraged that self-centered sense that the world revolved around fulfilling his needs.

I could only guess what traumas my father suffered when, already abandoned by his parents, he was plucked out of the country paradise he loved so much and thrust into the crushing world of a boys’ boarding school. His comments—“The great thing about going to an English public school is that you know that nothing as bad as that can ever happen to you again,” and “It took me forty years to recover from my public school”—kept echoing in my mind.

After World War I, when my father was finally reunited with his parents, he hardly recognized them. I, the unfavored daughter, felt a real sense of relief when I found this out, for it helped me to understand why he seemed such an unfeeling parent. Griffith’s failure to connect with his own children ran so deep that when he took us to Wales, to the place where he had been profoundly happy as a child, he could not even bring himself to tell us about it. Far from inspiring us with his memories, he failed even to mention that he had been there before.

Although it seemed to me that my father became ever more cantankerous as time went on, Griffith did not spend the last nineteen years of his life in retirement moping about his various grievances.

In 1969, my mother’s brother Sir Francis Cassel died. As the oldest son, Francis had assumed control of what remained of my grandfather’s estate in Luton—a 450-acre farm with a market garden and pair of petrol stations. The farm and the businesses had become run-down, and Griffith grabbed the opportunity to step in and take over the management.
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Entering a completely new field once again, Griffith was soon questioning, experimenting, and measuring everything—getting back to first principles in his usual restless, ineffably curious way. He studied the composition of the soil, the properties of the wheat, the rate at which the grain metabolized in storage. He bought a mill and began grinding his own wheat and making his own bread. A land economist from Cambridge whom Griffith consulted told me that, in all his years in farming, he had never met anyone with my father’s ability to get to the nub of a problem and find a simple, practical solution.

In the garages, too, he was always looking for ways to do things better, and he was always measuring—the evaporation rates of different types of fuel, the prices his competitors were charging, the temperature of the gasoline when it was delivered by tanker. The temperature was crucial. The retailer buys gasoline by volume, but it expands when it is hot, and tanker drivers can fill garage storage tanks to capacity with less gas, shortchanging the owner. Griffith would meet the tanker drivers brandishing his thermometer. If the gas was hot, he would demand compensation.

The farm, garages, and market garden prospered, but Griffith could not fully enjoy his success. He did not own the estate, nor did he have the authority of a real manager. Doey’s twin brother Harold had wanted to take control of the businesses, but his sisters, Hermione and Doey, equal owners with their brother, refused to allow it—believing that he, like Francis before him, would use the estate for his own benefit while allowing it to decline. Instead, they appointed Doey the manager, with Griffith in the background, doing the work. Although they depended on my father, Hermione and Doey refused him any formal authority. He could not decide anything without their permission. This was how my mother—backed up by my aunt—repaid my father for the way he had treated her, reserving for herself complete control over everything she owned.

It was a truly poisonous situation. Sir Harold, who felt that his rightful role as head of the family had been usurped by Griffith, referred to my father behind his back as “the cuckoo,” opposing every plan he came up with. Griffith would become deeply frustrated, and we always knew when he was on the warpath by the stump, stump, stump of his crutches as he followed Doey around the house, haranguing her. He had suffered the same impotence in relation to us children. My mother allowed him no say on where to educate us, whether to buy things for us, or how much or how little pocket money we should be given. His sensitivity about his lack of authority was so acute that he often surprised people by suddenly confiding, apropos of nothing, “Of course I’ve been unable to fulfill my function as a father because my wife has more money than me.”

The other side of the coin of all this impotence was his ability to live comfortably in our large house, his lack of responsibilities, and the absence of financial worries. He had his fancy sports cars and his Hoyo cigars. And then there was his boat—largely paid for by my mother and my aunt—a 40-foot, eight-berth prototype fiberglass catamaran, which he commissioned and helped to design in the mid-1960s and spent many happy weekends and holidays sailing.

Because he had all of life’s material comforts while he was still at the Medical Research Council, he had been able to behave like a gentleman scientist who cared nothing for ambition and only did his job out of personal interest. Griffith thought this was the life he wanted. He thought he didn’t care about his career or his public stature. When asked by a journalist, after he retired, whether Everest had given him “more opportunities” in his profession, his immediate reaction was to protest that he had never wanted a professorship. “I didn’t want a chair—I didn’t want a chair,” he insisted. “I had already got this beautiful house and garden. And we have never had to strain for money.”

As things turned out he never got a chair—he never tried to get one—and the price he paid for failing to advance his career was that people didn’t respect him in the way that he wanted. People often didn’t listen to him. He was often snubbed. He was frustrated working under a boss he felt was less able than he was, and—except by the Silver Hut scientists—he was not recognized for his scientific achievements in the way that he would have liked.

I have come away from studying my father’s life with a sense that, had he made different choices, a man like Griffith, with so many contradictions in his nature, might have turned out very differently.

He married Doey because she was wealthy, but she never really suited him. He was unable to make her happy or be happy with her. And in many ways her money proved to be a poisoned chalice, for it sapped his motivation to make the most of his remarkable talents. If he had married someone who demanded more of him, and if he had been forced to provide for himself and his family, to achieve a senior position at work and accept responsibility for others (as he showed he could on the Silver Hut expedition), he might have been happier, more fulfilled, and less difficult. The fact that he was never quite in charge of his own fate, either at home or at work, was a constant source of irritation to him. He wasn’t suited to the subordinate roles he accepted for himself. They diminished him and, in the end, they left him—as his friend and colleague had said—“a disappointed man.”