I WAS 18 when I saw my first inheritance thrown into the fire. My Granddad had left me his house, he’d done a “do-it-yourself” will bought from W.H. Smith`s. If I’d inherited, it was bound to cause trouble: he had four loving children and five other grandchildren. So I watched as my mother and my aunt burnt it. It was enough to know that he had cared enough to want to see my future secure. The house went to probate and was duly and fairly distributed.
Wills are strange things. I have a memory in my mind from an old black and white movie of the reading of a will in an oak-panelled room: the family grouped, looks of greedy anticipation on their faces and the shock as the final words delivered by a po-faced solicitor hand the fortune to the cook/dog/illegitimate child. I wonder whether wills like these ever actually happen. In these days of litigation, how free are we to distribute our chattels as we please after our death?
Here in Cyprus, there is apparently, a system of forced heirship. If a person dies leaving a spouse and children, then three-quarters of the estate passes to them in equal shares and the will maker has the freedom to dispose of the remaining one-quarter share as he or she desires.
However, currently there is a concession for those whose fathers were born in the UK. Provided they have a will, they are allowed to leave their Cyprus assets to whom they wish on their death. Quite a different social mind set to the idea that one’s belongings are one’s own to give away as you wish.
There is something rather pleasing to feel that after your death your assets can be used imaginatively. Take the case of John Bliss, a Somerset actor, who, no doubt hoping to appear in Hamlet, wrote in his will, “I leave my skull to the Crewkerne Players, in the hope that its appearance on stage during public performances may attract more favourable criticism than I did while appearing alive.” Or a chap from Kent who wrote, “To my first wife Sue, whom I always promised I would mention in my will – Hello Sue!”
Some, of course, are vindictive, like a wealthy New Yorker who left a will that said: “To my wife I leave one dollar and the knowledge that I wasn’t the fool she thought I was. To my son, I leave the pleasure of earning a living, which he has not done for thirty-five years. To my daughter, I leave one thousand dollars. She will need it. The only good piece of business her husband ever did was to marry her.”
The serious side of this is, of course, that many of us including me, put off making wills, thinking it is tempting fate. We like to think we are immortal, that the grim reaper won’t notice us if we keep quiet. But in these days of complicated family affairs with partners and lovers and step children and DNA, there are many who can lay claim to a piece of the pile. Better then to make one’s wishes clear and have fun doing it.
Last year, I finally did inherit my grandfather`s legacy, when the aunt who had thrown the will in the fire left me her house. It was an honourable last bequest, but it wasn’t her only. Leo Tolstoy famously bequeathed his possessions to the stump of a tree, but not so my aunt .We spent many cheerful afternoons towards the end of her life, with me perched on her bed, while she dictated who in the family was to receive various mementos. It gave her great pleasure to think that when she had gone a certain painting would hang on her brother’s wall, a bird bath still bathe birds in a neighbour’s garden, a chess set be played by her favourite godchild, or a string of pearls be worn by a naughty niece.
She liked to discuss in detail what would be appropriate for whom, it didn’t seem macabre, it seemed natural. It was a comforting way to end a life, and it is those individual items that I lug around the world with me that bring back memories of those that have gone. My Granddad’s trowel, my mother’s small, intricately carved cigarette holder and now a string of pearls.
