All I ever wanted was my mum’s love

Judges caused a storm this week by overturning the will of Heather’s mother, who’d left all her money to animals. So why was there such a bitter rift?

grandparents,’ says Heather. ‘It was all I knew, so I never questioned it, but looking back it was quite lonely and isolated.

‘ My mother had a history of pushing people away from her. She was never the most affectionate mother, but, yes, there were happy memories.’

Heather was 16 when she fell for Nick Ilott, two years her senior. Both remember the grilling he received when Heather brought him home to meet her mother for the first time.

What did his father do? Did he live in private or council housing? What was his job? Melita was not impressed.

‘My mother was polite to Nick’s face, but behind the scenes she was always on at me to end it with him.

‘It was awful because he couldn’t do without me and I couldn’t do without him, and it’s still the same to this day.’

Heather left home in the dead of night, taking only the clothes she was wearing, after her mother castigated her for returning home ten minutes late. She moved in with Nick and his parents, thinking it would provide a temporary breathing space from her mother, but she never returned home.

The rift deepened, Nick says, when one day Melita insulted him by saying ‘Your father! He’s nothing!’ before quickly apologising for her outburst.

Heather and Nick married and their first child, Adam, was born the following year, 1984.

The arrival of Melita’s first grandchild heralded a short- lived reconciliation between mother and daughter, engineered by Nick’s mother. ‘Melita visited Heather in hospital and when she brought Adam home,’ Nick says.

‘She bought us a pram and a tumble dryer, which we were very grateful for.

‘We really thought it was a new beginning for all of us, but then something would upset her and she’d send us a nasty letter, saying it would be better if we didn’t see each other and it went back to how it was before. It was very frustrat- ing.’ One day in 1994, after years of estrangement, Nick and Heather were in the car with four of their children when they spotted Melita in town and they all waved to her.

She waved back and later sent a kind letter saying she would like to meet up again, inviting them to lunch to celebrate her 60th birthday.

‘Melita was a fantastic cook and we had a wonderful roast lunch at her home,’ Nick says.

‘It was lovely and we really thought that this time we could put the past behind us and mend bridges.

‘Heather then received a letter from her mother saying we had showed her no gratitude or affection, and she didn’t want to see us again. It didn’t make any sense at all.’

Heather shows me a ream of letters from her mother, sent over the years. In one, dated May 2002, her mother claims she was left ‘penniless’ by her husband’s death, adding she had not received any compensation. She then warns: ‘You have a nerve to even think of my estate after the atrocity you have put me through.’ (It was only after Melita’s death that Heather discovered her mother had been well provided for.)

She continues: ‘It is not my wish that I leave you nothing from my estate, but what happened in the past 25 years was atrocious. You have left me no alternative. You have tortured me for 25 years . . .’

In a letter dated June 2003, Melita complains about Heather trespassing on her property. Heather tells me she’d dropped a birthday card through her mother’s letterbox, only to be accused of snooping.

‘As far as my mother was concerned, I couldn’t do anything right. One minute everything would be fine and the next she didn’t want to speak to me again.

‘She told us her door would always be open to the grandchildren, but when Adam went round to see her when he was 17, she leant out of the bedroom window and asked: “Who is it?” She wouldn’t let him in because she said that she had friends there.

‘I never gave up on our relationship and we spoke on the phone, but she told us we couldn’t drop round to her house — even though it was only ten minutes away — without an appointment.

‘The judge was right in that she was capricious. You never knew which way the wind would blow.’

Can Heather ever forgive her mother for cutting her out of her will? ‘I have five children and if any of them upset me or we fell out, I could never disown them in the way my mother disowned me.

‘Someone asked me the other day if I loved my mother and I just didn’t know what to say. And anyway, the question is: did she love me?’

’You’ve tortured me for 25 years,’ Mum’s letter said