Where there’s a will, there’s often a row. A legacy need be of no great value to cause a spat: I’ve seen grown siblings weep over their dead mother’s favourite salad bowl. But an inheritance seldom brings out the best in people and the larger the prize, the greater the conflict and moral corruption it is likely to occasion. Such ructions were the mainstay of the great Victorian novels, often deployed as the turbines in the vast engine rooms of 19th-century fiction. They feature in Trollope, Wilkie Collins and Dickens and continue into contemporary fiction. Divided fortunes can create divided families – and good stories.
War medals, flowers, a dead boy’s hair: their changing resonance through time brings opportunities to consider the difference between value and values; between family and fortune. How are we to remember the lost sweetness of our own young lives and find ways to memorialise the dead? Ultimately, inheritance isn’t only about stuff. In the end we have to hope, as Larkin wrote, that: “What will survive of us is love.”
