Being rejected when you're just a toddler is a trauma which never leaves... But my mother abandoned me twice in my life

but that didn’t stop her from feeling an immense loneliness and isolation not knowing where she was from.

Abandoned at a Liverpool convent when she was a baby, she was soon adopted and was loved and cared for.

“Mine was a very happy adoption,” says Katharine, now 50.

“My family was fantastic but they all had strong characteristics of their own which I didn’t share.

“Even as a toddler I realised everyone was looking at family photos of people who looked nothing like me. It doesn’t undermine or affect the warm comfort and stability of the family I was a part of, in fact I think I have grown up happy and grounded because of them.

“But I am still the cuckoo.

“My brother was not adopted. He was eight years old when I came into the family and I always knew I was the usurper. You can’t ignore that feeling.”

Katharine, who lives in London, recognises the delight at adoptive parents bringing a new child into the family, but acknowledges an “imbalance”

between that delight and the trauma of the adopted child of not knowing their birth parents, a trauma which Katharine says stays with them forever.

She explains: “Experts say that children don’t recognise themselves as a separate entity from their mothers until they are about two years old, and it alters the way a human brain develops.

“From a child’s perspective they are grieving. They have been torn from their roots and they will never get over it.”

The author of The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream will visit Essex next month to talk about her memoirs, something she describes as a “meditation of origins”.

It is her first book, and one which was not originally meant for publication.

Based around a summer holiday inWales in 2009 with her daughter, Evie, who was nine years old at the time, it was written as a travelogue and something for Evie to look back on.

Living in Barcelona where summer holidays for schoolchildren last for three months, Katharine decided to take Evie to their cottage in North Wales.

“I’d suffered a miscarriage and I needed a project to get me through the summer holiday,” says Katharine.

“We had weeks before any other children would be on the beach with us to offer Evie company so I came up with an idea of going for walks and following the rivers from source to the sea.

“Some rivers were just a few hundred metres long but some went on for miles and Evie, who was at such magical age, didn’t flinch at walking ten miles.

“I don’t take photographs but I wanted to confirm this trip in some way. I also had an odd sense that something was going to happen.”

She set on the idea of chronicling their trip in words.

Katharine says: “I imagined it would be something for Evie to look back on. I was going to design the cover and it was all going to be very organic. A family heirloom.”

But then life took a turn that would change Katharine’s life forever.

Katharine explains: “I had been feeling very tired and I had a strange sense that my life was draining away. I hadn’t looked well for months and then I found a lump in my breast.

“It took three doctors five months to refer me for a mammogram, and that was only because I lied to the third doctor and said the others had suggested it.

“It turns out I had a rare and aggresive form of breast cancer. Two weeks later I had surgery to remove the lump. I had four months of chemotherapy and then a bilateral mastectomy. From start to finish the treatment took 11 months.”

It was the cancer which spurred Katharine, who is free of active cancer but is still on medication, to learn more about her biological family’s medical history.

What she discovered shocked her to the core.

“I sent off a letter that would be passed on to my birth mother and thought that within a couple of weeks we would be invited to talk over tea and cakes, albeit awkwardly,” says Katharine.

“But I was not prepared for the response I got.” 

Katharine’s birth mother wanted nothing to do with her. 

Even when faced with the news her biological daughter had cancer and all she wanted was information on her birth family’s medical history, Katharine’s birth mum refused to meet her daughter but gave her the information Katharine required, ending the letter telling Katharine never to contact her again.

Katharine had to deal with being rejected by her birth mother not once, but twice.

“The firmly closed door was far more difficult to deal with than the cancer,” says Katharine.

“Cancer is presented to you and you have no choice but to deal with it. If you don’t, you die.

“I was astonished that someone could behave in such a way towards their own child. It’s the callous and hard way she did it. She referred to me as ‘It’.

“After I received that last letter I shaved my whole body – my eyebrows, my head, my pubic hair. It’s like I had been assaulted physically and I wanted to wash everything off me.”

Having tried to conceive for 12 years before Evie was born through IVF, the idea of a mother rejecting her child was alien to Katharine.

“I was 36 years old when Evie was born. I had never seen a human being who looked like me before and it was bizarre. Even now it feels like a wonder,” she says.

When it came to putting pen to paper to chart her astonishing journey from river source to sea, the story evolved into being one about finding her roots and discovering herself.

Katharine says: “I have always been a private person but I have been touched by the way people have responded to my book.

“It has spoken to men and women who were adopted – and that’s really heartwarming.”

• Katharine Norbury will appear at King Belfairs Woodland Centre, Eastwood Road North, Leigh, from 7pm to 9pm on Friday, March 27, as part of the Essex Book Festival. Tickets, which are priced from £4, can be obtained from the Mercury Theatre at www.mercurytheatre .co.uk/event or call 01206 573948. The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream is published by Bloomsbury.