Forget-Me-Not Child by Anne Bennett

Author:Anne Bennett [Anne Bennett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

The next day as Stan joined the family for Sunday dinner he said, ‘They are recommending that all men who haven’t already done so should make a will before they are sent overseas.’

Angela gave a shiver and Stan said, ‘Just because I have been asked to make a will doesn’t mean that anything is going to happen to me. It’s a precaution to help your loved ones if anything did happen.’

‘Well no good me making a will,’ Mary said. ‘For I would have nothing to leave.’

‘Ah but I have a son,’ Stan said. ‘A son that I have had no hand in rearing. Meanwhile I have been given a good salary over the years and only me to spend it on and I am not a great drinker, do not gamble, only have the one packet of fags a day and for years now any money left over from my wages has been put in the Post Office for Daniel. I want to make sure he will get it if anything happens to me though I will put in a codicil that the money be kept in trust for Daniel until he is twenty-one. My commanding officer helped me when I admitted I didn’t know the least thing about making a will. He told me the firm to go to in the city centre too. Apparently they do a lot of military wills.’

‘But do you really need a will when Daniel is with family?’ Mary said. ‘Surely Betty would make sure the boy got the money?’

‘How would Betty explain it?’ Stan asked. ‘I signed all rights to my son to Betty and her husband and have no contact at all really because she said it would just confuse him.’

‘Don’t see how it could,’ Mary said. ‘Betty was wrong to ask you to do that. You were still mourning your wife.’

Stan nodded. ‘My head was all over the place in the beginning and I couldn’t have coped with Daniel. I was glad of Betty then.’

‘I know you were,’ Mary said, for she remembered it well.

‘Didn’t give her the right to steal your son,’ Barry said. ‘You couldn’t have been in your right mind when you signed those papers because I could never sign my child away.’

‘Aye, Barry,’ said Angela. ‘But we have had Connie eighteen months, think if you were faced with a newborn baby and a dead wife?’

‘Yes,’ Mary said. ‘Stan was very vulnerable then and Betty took advantage.’

‘And the plus side of all this is that Betty and Roger love Daniel,’ Stan said. ‘I know that they will love and care for him as if he was their own son and that’s what Betty wants him to be. How then will she explain the money? I don’t think for one moment that she will steal the money from him but she could very easily say it was a gift from them, her and Roger. I want a solicitor to deal with it and so I intend writing Daniel a letter explaining everything to him.

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