My mother died without making a will in October 1994. I was 21 and my younger brother was 10. I was part-way through my university studies but my brother was not due to start his until 2000 or 2001. We knew that his higher education would have to be funded from my mother’s estate but we could not get anyone to agree to this.

So, on legal advice, my brother and I started legal proceedings to secure some provision from the estate. My mother’s husband, whom she had known for six months and been married to for three, was apparently entitled to the considerable majority; he was unwilling to share anything with us.

In March 2000 – two sets of legal proceedings and three firms of solicitors later – an order was made by the court that £7,500 should be paid to me and £40,000 should be paid to my brother when he reached 18 (in December 2001). We had received some form of recompense for our mother’s death – or so it seemed.

For some of the time we had been funded by legal aid, but my legal aid was withdrawn when I started earning. I was told that nothing could be paid out to us until the solicitors’ bills for the two sets of proceedings had been “assessed” and the legal aid fund had recovered from the estate what was due to it under what was known as the “legal aid charge”.

The bills (all 44 pages) were received promptly by my (third) firm of solicitors in March 2000. There were a number of issues I had with the bills (I thought they were excessive for the quality and quantity of work), and I raised these immediately, as best I could.

Since then I have been waiting. I have tried to engineer progress, including a fruitless reference to the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors [now the Legal Complaints Service].

The first solicitor to work on the case has spent more than five years promising – but failing – to sort out his share of the bills. He is always nearly there or going to devote time to it next month or expecting it to be resolved shortly: it never is.

His array of excuses demeans the legal profession and provides an object lesson on why public trust in it just isn’t there. False or insincere apologies; emotional appeals; blaming others; hopelessly unrealistic timing estimates; unreal promises of future activity: they are all there.

In the meantime, I have helped to support my brother through university and his course in Canada has now finished with more than C$30,000 (£14,070) of debt.

We have just passed the twelfth anniversary of my mother’s death and the start of these proceedings. Our entitlement to £47,500 less increasing costs (presumably being eaten away by inflation as well) has still not been resolved. What would Dickens say?

Surely, the law giving everything to a husband, whether married for a few weeks or separated for ten years, does not work. Surely, a mother’s priority upon her death would have been her young children?

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