INTERVIEW
HEATHER ILOTT would like to say she loved her late mother, Melita, but theirs was a fraught, complicated and confusing relationship marked by recrimination, uneasy truces and long periods of estrangement until her death in 2004.
In a series of accusatory letters penned to her daughter over the years — fanned out before Heather — Melita Jackson made it crystal clear just how bitterly disappointed she felt with her only child. She had never forgiven her daughter for leaving home aged 17 — without a goodbye or a note — after a tearful row over Heather’s boyfriend and future husband, Nick Ilott.
Melita, whose husband, Thomas, died in a tragic accident when she was pregnant with Heather, had aspirations for her daughter and did not approve of Nick, whose family lived in a council house. Her disapproval festered for decades, untempered by the Ilotts’ 1983 marriage and the arrival of five grandchildren.
Nothing, however, could have prepared Heather for the shocking contents of her mother’s last will and testament.
She had left not a penny of her £486,000 estate to Heather. Instead, she bequeathed her entire fortune to three animal charities, despite having had no affiliation with them during her lifetime or any noticeable concern for animal welfare.
‘I couldn’t have felt more hurt, wounded or rejected,’ says Heather, 54.
‘My mother was a very difficult woman. She blew hot and cold with her emotions and was impossible to please. Heaven knows I tried.
‘I never knew where I stood with her. After she died, I began to wonder if she’d ever loved me — why else would she be so spiteful?’
In a further twist of the knife, Melita — anticipat- ing Heather’s upset over her will — left instructions for the executors of her estate to ‘strenuously’ fight any attempt by her daughter to challenge her final wishes. And fight they did.
Last week, after a mammoth 11-year legal battle, the Court of Appeal — in a landmark decision — awarded Heather Ilott a £164,000 share of her mother’s estate.
This was after agreeing with Mrs Ilott’s lawyers that Melita had been ‘unreasonable, capricious and harsh’ by disinheriting her daughter in favour of The Blue Cross, RSPB and the RSPCA.
The award means the Ilotts will be able to buy their rented housing association cottage in Ware, Hertfordshire, and look forward to a more financially secure retirement.
Heather Ilott gave up her bank teller job to become a full-time mother some years ago, while Nick made a living as a mechanic.
So what does Heather make of the controversy generated by those who decried the ruling and argued that the courts should never be able to overturn the contents of a will, no matter how eccentric?
What was the point of even writing a will, they asked, if the contents can be disregarded by judges?
James Aspden, the lawyer representing the charities, warned the decision could have ‘serious ramifications for the future of the charity sector’.
‘Nearly £2 billion a year is donated to charitable causes through legacies and without it much of their work would not be possible,’ he continued.
‘This case raises serious questions about whether people have the freedom to choose who they want to leave money to in their will.’
Some suggested that if they were in Heather’s position, they wouldn’t want anything from a parent who had placed impossibly high conditions on their love.
Today, an emotional Heather says: ‘This was money my mother inherited as a result of my father’s death and, regardless of how she felt about me, I strongly believe he would have wanted provision made for me.
‘Not only that, but she’d lied to me, saying she’d been left penniless when my father died.
‘This will not open the floodgates to countless adult children, but it will mean that people will have to be much clearer about their wishes and justify them when they make their wills, which I think is a good thing.’
The biggest mystery of all is why Melita Jackson was so determined to deprive her daughter of her inheritance. That is why Heather Ilott has agreed to meet me.
A quiet, softly-spoken woman, she may have struggled to love her mother, but she doesn’t hate her either.
‘People think this was all about the money, but nothing could be further from the truth,’ she says. ‘It was about the principle. It’s about what my late father would have wanted for the child he never lived to see.’
Heather challenged her mother’s will under the Inheritance (Provision For Family And Dependants) Act 1975, with the help of barrister John Collins and Brie Stevens-Hoare QC of the Bar Pro Bono Unit, which provides free legal assistance.
‘I did nothing wrong to deserve my mother’s spite. My only crime was to fall in love with Nick and my mother didn’t approve.
‘There were many times when we tried to reconcile with my mother, but she didn’t want to know. One minute she would accept us, the next she would reject us again for no apparent reason. Whenever she offered us the olive branch of peace, we would accept — only to find it came attached to elastic that would snap back the minute we reached out for it.
‘Two years before she died, she insisted I apologise to her for the hurt I caused by leaving home at 17, which I did over the phone. She then decided this wasn’t good enough and asked for me to put it in writing, which I did. But then she wasn’t happy with that either. Nothing was ever good enough.
‘I couldn’t understand why she left everything to animal charities. The only pet we’d had was a long-legged Jack Russell called Cuddles, but my mother could not be described as an animal lover. I can only imagine she did that to hurt me even more.’
To this day, Heather is searching for answers to her mother’s inscrutable character, which she confesses to finding completely unfathomable. Melita never spoke about her own family, and it was only after her death that Heather discovered her mother was one of 13 children born to a Scottish ploughman.
Nor did Melita ever talk to Heather about her late husband, Scottishborn Thomas Jackson, who she met at a dance in Dundee in the early Fifties.
Following their marriage in 1956, the couple moved to a new-build house in Hertfordshire, where Melita set about losing her Scottish accent and completely distancing herself from her siblings.
Melita was six months pregnant with Heather when Thomas, who worked as an electrician for the BBC, fell 600 ft to his death from a broadcasting mast in Cardiff. He was 29.
‘My mother was obviously traumatised by my father’s death, but she never talked about him when I was growing up. She was a very private, almost secretive person who never opened up about her emotions.’
After Thomas’s death, his mother Ellen, sister Muriel and her husband Eric all came to stay with Melita — but Heather says her mother soon asked them to leave and, for reasons unknown, wanted little more to do with them after Heather’s birth.
It was Muriel who saved Melita the trauma of identifying Thomas’s body and Eric who fought for £5,000 compensation and a decent pension for her from the BBC Benevolent Fund.
Thomas had not been wearing a safety harness when he fell, so without Eric’s help Melita would have been left in dire financial straits.
Significantly, Melita, who used the money to pay off her mortgage, left £5,000 to the BBC Benevolent Fund in the very will that disinherits Heather.
In another tragic twist, Thomas’s mother died in a house fire not long after Heather was born. When Heather and Nick named their youngest daughter Ellen, it triggered another estrangement with Melita, who had not got on with Thomas’s mother.
Heather was five when Melita paired up with a supermarket manager called Bill, a divorced man who shared her home. They were companions rather than partners. He was at least 20 years her senior and died in the Nineties.
‘Growing up, there were no aunts and uncles or cousins to play with, no
‘I began to wonder if she’d ever loved me’ ‘My only crime was falling in love with Nick’