Bric-a-Brac and Broken Wings / Hilary Ayshford

Our mother was a serial collector - of thimbles, plates with maps on them, Beswick porcelain figures of horses and birds, Lilliput houses, decorative paperweights, Wade Whimsies and coloured glass animals. Or rather, we made her collect them. For birthdays or Christmases she always said she didn't want anything except to spend time with us, her family, so we chose things we thought she would appreciate. Pretty things with no practical use. We had no idea if she actually liked thimbles or plates or ceramic animals, but because she saw the love with which they were given she let us believe she did. 

Our mother also collected people. We don't know if she went looking for them, or if they were naturally drawn to her: the waifs and strays, the downtrodden, the helpless, society's rejects, the people nobody else wanted. They even occupied our home from time to time. We called them 'mother's lame ducks', but only ever behind her back. 

To us as children, mother's lame ducks seemed decidedly odd; they didn't speak like us, look like us, smell like us. They were too demanding, too needy. They took up too much of her time and attention – time and attention we felt was rightfully ours. We were thankful they didn't stay around for long; they took what they needed from our mother and moved on, only to be replaced by another collection of misfits. For her sake, we tried hard to like them, to help them, to accept them, but in reality we managed only to temper our resentment, knowing that they would be gone soon.

We got used to phone calls in the middle of the night that would send her off on some emergency mission of mercy, usually accompanied by our father to keep her safe in some seedy part of town among unsavoury company. We understood how lucky we were, not only because we had so much while the lame ducks had little or nothing, but because we had her for our mother. As children we were jealous because it seemed sometimes that she loved her lame ducks more than she loved us. As adults we understood that love wasn't rationed; she had more to give than we could ever use and their need for it was far greater than ours.

After our mother died, we took down the thimbles, the plates with maps on them, the porcelain figurines, the paperweights and the tiny glass animals, dusted them and put them carefully back in their places. None of us wanted them – we had found our own things to collect by then – but we couldn't bring ourselves to give them to a charity shop or throw them away. They had become a symbol, not just of our love for our mother, nor of her love for us, but of her love of humanity as a whole. 

At her funeral, many of the lame ducks came to mourn her, to comfort us and tell us how she had changed their lives. We invited them back afterwards, to the home where everyone was welcome and nobody was ever turned away, and each of them left with a thimble, a plate with a map on it, a Beswick figure or glass animal – a reminder that, however badly life had treated them, our mother had seen the good in them and they had been loved.