My mum was an immigrant: she's gone now but the love remains

[This is the text of the oration I delivered at my mother’s funeral] My mum was an immigrant. She came to this country out of history. She was born into an age where the car and the phone were still novel. She grew to adulthood through the darkest period of Europe’s recent past. Erika Thielebein then arrived in London at the start of the second Elizabethan Age, the latter half of the exciting, frightening 20th century. So for me she always represented much more than ‘just’ a mother.