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The family tussle over my dear Mum's heirlooms that's shown me the best gift we can give the next generation

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Tussle: Tom Utley's late mother owned a pretty marquetry escritoire, similar to the one pictured, which she'd inherited on her own mother's death

This week, my three siblings and I have been engaged in the melancholy business of clearing out our late mother’s almshouse flat and dividing her few earthly possessions between us.

I’d gone into the negotiations thinking, but not saying, that I’d quite like the only decent piece of furniture she owned — a pretty marquetry escritoire, perhaps 17th or 18th-century Dutch or French, which she’d inherited on her own mother’s death. Its twin, though infinitely better preserved, is in the Victoria And Albert Museum.

But we were all being frightfully well bred and British about the whole thing, and getting nowhere.

‘No, really, I don’t want it. You have it.’

‘No, no, honestly, I’d much rather you had it.’

‘Look, you have the escritoire. I’ll have her toaster, if nobody else wants it. I’ve always quite fancied one that makes four slices at once. On second thoughts, you have the toaster, for heaven’s sake.

Ours works perfectly well . . .’

And so on, and so on.

It was only after about half an hour of total stalemate that a revelation began to dawn on me: the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I didn’t actually want the escritoire at all. Nor the toaster, come to that.

Much to my surprise, I saw that when I’d been protesting I didn’t want anything, I was telling nothing more or less than the unvarnished truth. 

This wasn’t because I suddenly felt it was in some way improper to be haggling over my beloved mother’s property (albeit in a paralysingly British way) when she was barely cold in her grave.

Indeed, that thought hardly flickered across my mind before I dismissed it as sentimental and absurd.

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Nor, believe me or not, was it because I’d just had a closer look at the escritoire, properly noticing for the first time that, unlike its V&A twin, it has dirty great cracks in its front and sides, which must cut its value by about 90 per cent.

The reason I didn’t and don’t want it, as I realised in that epiphany, was simply that I already have quite enough furniture and possessions in my suburban semi. So why on earth should I want any more?

It wasn’t as if I needed anything to remember my mother by. I know I’ll have no difficulty whatsoever in remembering her, with deep love, for as long as I live — without the slightest necessity for a chipped porcelain shepherdess or an occasional table to prompt the recollection.

      More from Tom Utley...   Never trust anyone who is certain about anything. Of that, I'm absolutely 100 per cent sure 30/05/13   Listen up, folks, this British snob has a confession to make. Americans speak better English than us... it's a no-brainer 23/05/13   What would my old village Bobby make of these swaggering RoboCops toting assault rifles that fire 750 rounds a minute? 16/05/13   Read one grumpy column by Tom Utley - and get next week's free: Or why I keep falling for devilishly ingenious supermarket offers that actually pick my pocket 09/05/13   I hate Nimbys... but I hate the new lean-to on my neighbours' patio even more! 18/04/13   A heartfelt letter to my grieving mother and Maggie's great unknown quality - her human kindness 11/04/13   Mr Osborne looks like a French aristo in a powdered wig. But that's no reason to put on this prolier than thou routine 04/04/13   Forgive me, but there is nothing David Miliband can teach me about feeling murderous rage towards your brother 28/03/13   Repeat after me: If 100 experts say it's wrong for children to learn by rote, they must all be nitwits 21/03/13   VIEW FULL ARCHIVE

No. There was a time when the prospect of free goods would have filled my covetous, materialistic soul with glee — and I would have grabbed everything I could lay my hands on, whether I needed it or not. 

But I seem suddenly to have reached a stage in life when the pleasure of accumulating possessions has evaporated.

Nor, now I come to think of it, do I have very strong ambitions left in other directions. I’ve no desire for fame or promotion, I can do without glittering prizes — and as for exotic holidays, I can take them or leave them.

But there is one thing that keeps me going, as it has done all my adult life, and that is the deepest-rooted human instinct of the lot — far more forceful than the desire to own property.

It’s an instinct I share with the overwhelming majority of parents the world over (though not all of them), and it’s certainly one that my own mother and father felt very deeply.

Indeed, it’s because they did that, at the end, my mother had so pitifully few material possessions to show for her 85 years on this Earth.

The instinct I mean, of course, is the desire to do the very best we can to give a leg-up in life to our young.

For my parents, this meant making huge sacrifices to send the oldest three of their four children to independent schools (the money just wouldn’t stretch to number four, the younger of my two sisters).

For my wife and me, the reality that we couldn’t afford any more fees dawned rather sooner, and the younger two of our four boys were educated by the state. But like so many other parents, worse off than us, we always strove to give them as many other material advantages of a middle-class upbringing as we could manage.

Indeed, I would say that the instinct to provide for our young is one of the strongest incentives to hard work and self-reliance, and therefore one of the most powerful driving-forces of an efficient economy.

This is why my Tory heart sank yesterday when David Willetts announced that he was proposing to add white, working-class boys to the list of minorities who must be given favourable treatment by university admissions tutors, presumably at the expense of middle-class applicants.

David Willetts announced that he was proposing to add white, working-class boys to the list of minorities who must be given favourable treatment by university admissions tutors

In a way, of course, the Universities Minister is right. If we have to have a system of positive discrimination for the economically disadvantaged — and I would argue passionately that we don’t — it is clearly a repellent idea that any teenager should benefit or suffer simply because of the colour of his skin (although it seems very wrong to me, too, that working-class white boys are to be given an advantage over girls of the same colour and class, simply because of their sex).

He is also right to identify under-achievement by working-class white boys, who are at or near the bottom of the educational heap, as a distinctive social problem.

Indeed, it is a remarkable and disturbing fact that more young women are now winning university places than young men are even applying for them, after a 13 per cent slump in applications from male students in the latest intake — four times deeper than the fall-off from females.

But isn’t the minister approaching this problem from precisely the wrong way round? 

Instead of rigging the admissions system to let more working-class white boys in, shouldn’t he be asking why they’re under-achieving so dismally in the first place, and try to fix the problem at its roots?

If he tackled it this way, I reckon he’d find it has much to do with the feminisation of education in schools, from nursery and primary level upwards. 

As I never tire of arguing, boys are different from girls. They need firmer discipline, thrive more on competition and — above all, perhaps — they need the masculine role models that increasing numbers with feckless, absentee fathers are denied at home.

Yet alarmingly, fewer and fewer men are becoming teachers, with female applicants for teacher-training courses outnumbering males by 60,335 to 19,725 at the last count.

Outnumbered: Fewer and fewer men are becoming teachers, with female applicants for teacher-training courses outnumbering males by 60,335 to 19,725 at the last count

I might add that if Mr Willetts really wanted to do working-class boys a favour, whatever their colour, he’d bring back the grammar schools that gave him his own leg-up in life.

By doing it his way, on the other hand, he will only feed into universities more young people who lack the grounding to benefit from their courses, while offering a slap in the face to hard-working parents who strive to do the right thing for their children.

For once, I’m not thinking of our own boys’ interests, since all four got safely into universities (and the younger two are still there, drawing heavily on the bank of mum and dad). But I do worry for those like my elder brother’s three (state-educated) children — oldest, 13 — who still have that hurdle to jump.

As it happens, it was his wife, my sister-in-law, who broke the oh-so-British stalemate between me and my siblings over who should have which of our  mother’s possessions.

With a woman’s no-nonsense practicality, she walked into the flat and said: ‘OK, we want that, that and that’ — with the second ‘that’ being my mother’s one decent bit of furniture.

I must say it was a great weight off my mind. I just worry about how the admissions tutors will treat my nephews and niece if the secret gets out that their parents own anything as ineffably middle-class as a marquetry escritoire.



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