Crime writer Cath Staincliffe's search for her Irish mother uncoveredthe story of Evelyn Cullen, who had fled to England when pregnant andreluctantly given her baby up for adoption. Thirty years later, they were reunited, she tells Chris Dooley

Even without the traumatic event that disrupted her life, Evelyn Cullen's student days in 1950s Dublin would have been anything but ordinary. Not many, after all, spend evenings studying for their nursing exams at Áras an Uachtaráin, where Evelyn was a frequent guest of her aunt Phyllis and her husband, President Sean T. O'Kelly.

On one occasion, she attended a reception there to care for the Taoiseach, Eamon de Valera, who was recovering from an eye operation and was practically blind at the time. Peter Ustinov was among the guests.

Both Phyllis and her brother, Dr James Ryan, had been guardians to Evelyn and her 11 brothers and sisters since the deaths of both their parents. Phyllis was a well-known scientist and Dr Ryan was a minister in de Valera's government.

With such a distinguished and, she recalls, very loving family to support her, and qualification as a nurse from St Vincent's Hospital beckoning, life was very promising.

Then, early in 1956, she discovered she was pregnant.

Had she made the news known, she says, she would "probably would have ended up in the Magdalen Laundries". Her major concern, however, was for the fate of her twin brother, Jim, who was studying for the priesthood. "Had there been any scandal at all associated with his family, he would have been kicked out of the seminary."

"Father Jim", as she calls him, and to whom she was very close, died in 1985. The story of her baby, born in a home for single mothers in Leeds, when he thought she was pursuing her nursing career in England, was the one secret she kept from him all his life.

She also kept it from her subsequent seven children until it slipped out, almost casually, in a conversation with her youngest daughter, Úna, about seven years ago. Sitting over the breakfast table at the family home in Wexford, Úna, home on holidays from England, told her mother she was going for a job near Harrogate.

"I said 'I had a little girl in Bradford, it's very near Harrogate'." For the first time, Úna heard the story of the girl born to both her parents, Eveyln and her late father M.J., before they were married. "She said 'Mum, we'll have to find her'."

What Evelyn didn't know was that the "little girl", now the English crime novelist Cath Staincliffe, had just begun a search of her own.

It was only after Cath's own daughter was born, when Cath was in her 30s, that she began to want answers to the questions in her mind about her own mother and why she had given her up for adoption. Her adoptive parents in Bradford had always been open about her background, but they had only a few facts to go on. Her birth mother was Irish, had the surname Ryan (Evelyn's maiden name) and was a nurse. "That was all I knew." So in 1994, the year in which her first novel featuring the private investigator Sal Kilkenny was published, Cath began some serious detective work of her own. The novel was called Looking for Trouble.

Fearful of finding trouble of her own, she proceeded with extreme caution She began by contacting an agency in Manchester that advises people in her situation, After Adoption. They gave her a leaflet which she put in a drawer for six months.

"The whole prospect of doing anything else was terrifying. I had a deep-rooted fear of rejection. If I found her, would she acknowledge me? There was even a rumour that she had gone to a nunnery. I had this image that maybe she'd be a nun and I'd come barging in to announce I was her daughter." After receiving counselling from After Adoption, she finally applied for her adoption papers. From these, she found out her mother's first name and her childhood address, the Ryans' farm in Taghmon in Wexford.

The papers told her Evelyn was one of 12 children and that her twin brother was a student priest. They even explained that this was one of the reasons the Catholic Church, which ran the home in Leeds where Cath was born, had decided to help - so that there would be no scandal.

Cath also "discovered" something else in the adoption papers: that she was the product of a holiday romance between her mother and a French student, whose surname Evelyn was unable to remember.

"I wondered if I was half French and half Irish. My identity was being thrown all over the place. But I did have a suspicion from the start that it was a cover story." She was right. Obliged to provide the father's name, Evelyn had protected M.J.'s identity by using the first name of a French student who had stayed with her cousin that summer. "I knew he would never be back and anyway I didn't even know his surname, so it had no consequences for him," she recalls.

Her correct hunch, however, gave rise to new anxieties for Cath about her background. If Evelyn had invented the French student story, was it to cover some terrible secret, such as incest perhaps? "You just would have no idea at that point."

Cath also learned from the papers that her mother had had her for seven weeks at the home, St Margaret's, before she was given up for adoption. "I thought how difficult must that have been, to give your child up after that length of time."

It was so difficult, Evelyn now recalls at her home in Wexford town, that she used to feed Cath - whom she called Mary - with the baby's back turned, so they could not make eye contact and bond. "I used to go to bed every night wishing she would die because it would be easier to bury her than to give her away."

Having taken that initial step, Cath was unsure if she wanted to take things further. But she did put her name on a register of parents and adoptees seeking to get in touch with birth relatives.

Then, in November 1996, two years after she had accessed her papers, she received a letter from After Adoption. "I thought it was a subscription notice. Then I opened it to learn that my birth mother and sister wanted to get in contact." Feeling "very overwhelmed", she called the agency to read the letter from Úna.

For the first time, she learned that her mother had gone on to marry her father, M.J. Cullen, who died in 1985, and that she had seven full brothers and sisters.

"I was the eldest of eight. That was stunning." She wrote to Evelyn who "wanted to get on a plane and come and meet straight away", but Cath, ever cautious, delayed the first meeting. "I felt I needed time and space. It was really overwhelming," she says. They wrote frequently. Evelyn recalls: "I said 'I'll be dead before I meet you. I'll never get to give you a hug'."

Cath, over time, learnt the full story of how M.J., the only other person who knew Evelyn was pregnant, saw her off to England from the North Wall ferry terminal. How she cried all the way there, and worked for a short time in a hospital in Halifax before telling her employer she was pregnant and being moved to St Margaret's.

They finally met in September 1997, in the Setanta Room of the Shelbourne Hotel, where they spent most of the day alone together.

"It was just wonderful," says Evelyn. "We cried and we hugged and cried and hugged and talked and talked and talked." After lunch, they went for a walk. "I was on cloud nine. I wouldn't have cared if a bus ran over me outside the Shelbourne, my mission was accomplished," Evelyn adds. Cath brought copies of her first two detective novels, and Evelyn is now an avid reader. "Only I worry that she's going to be killed. In my mind, it's not Sal Kilkenny in the story, it's Cath."

At least she can read her daughter's latest novel without such concerns. After six detective novels, Cath has moved out of the crime genre to write Trio, a story concerning three young Catholic girls in Manchester in 1960 who find themselves pregnant and unmarried. They have three daughters who are placed with adoptive families, and the story follows the lives of the women and girls concerned over the ensuing years. It is not autobiographical, says Cath, but it does draw on her own experiences and contains elements of her story.