This story begins in Belfast at Christmas 1945. It's a sad story but it has a happy ending. It's a story about a child, a young woman and a middle-aged couple. The child and the woman are still alive. The couple are long dead.

That Christmas, Belfast was filled with soldiers coming back from the second World War. It had raged for six long years, had cost millions of lives and devastated whole continents. It had altered the political map of Europe and changed thousands of lives, including the lives of the people in this story.

But that Christmas, there was a festive air about the place. People were overjoyed that the war had finally ended and the Allies had won. The young woman, who had come up from the country to work in the city, went to a party. There was a group of American soldiers there. Everyone was celebrating. At the party, she met a handsome American officer who was returning to the US. Two months later, she discovered she was pregnant.

She was terrified. This was not a good time to be single and pregnant in Ireland. There was no unmarried mother's allowance. There was no State support. A girl who got pregnant was an object of shame. The young woman couldn't tell her family. She was alone in a big city where she knew hardly anyone. She decided to have her baby in secret.

When the time came, she went into a home and gave birth to a little girl. She found a room in a house in the Falls Road and kept her baby for four months. How she managed, we can only wonder. She had little money and she couldn't work to support herself and her child. In desperation, she was forced the give up her baby for adoption.

Somebody put her in touch with a priest who knew a couple who wanted a child. The priest took the baby and gave it to the couple. In her innocence, the young woman thought she could still see her baby. She kept visiting the child and bringing little presents till eventually the new parents told her they didn't think it was a good idea. They asked her to stop calling. It broke the woman's heart. She was sure she would never see her child again.

The people who adopted the baby were a childless couple. They had suffered a series of miscarriages. The woman had been told that she could never have children. So they were overjoyed to have a baby at last. They didn't have much money but what they had they lavished on the child. She had toys. She had clothes. She had love.

But she grew up lonely. All around her, she saw big families. She wondered why she had no brothers or sisters. She wondered why she was an only child. Nobody told her she had been adopted.

Then one day in 1954, something dreadful happened. The little girl overheard a conversation and learnt the truth. She was eight years old. She was devastated. She was assailed by doubts about her real parents and why they had given her away. Did they not love her? Did they not want her? But she kept the information bottled up inside herself and told no-one.

By the time she was 16, both her adoptive parents had died. They died without telling her the story of her birth. They were afraid that if she knew the truth, she might not love them. Time passed. She married and had her own family. But she always wondered about her birth parents and what had happened to make them give her away. She wondered if she had brothers and sisters. Then one day in 1992, she decided to find them.

She managed to get a copy of her original birth certificate. It contained her mother's name. The space for her father's name was blank. After a lot of trouble, she traced her mother's birth certificate. It showed she was born in a small village in the west. She began making telephone calls.

But a further set-back awaited. She soon discovered that her mother and entire family had emigrated to the US in the early 1950s. It seemed she had reached the end of the road. And then, miraculously, she was directed to a man who had an address.

People advised her to stop now. They said her mother had started a new life. She might not welcome her. She could be disappointed. But she went ahead. From the address she was able to get a phone number and made the fateful call. A woman answered. She began by asking her if she had lived in Belfast at the end of the war; if she had a little girl who she gave up for adoption.

She said: "Do you know who this is speaking to you now?"

Her mother said: "Yes."

They began corresponding. In the letters, her mother told her some of the details of her birth, but she avoided mention of her father. Within a month they were reunited in America. But there was one further sad twist. Her mother had married but her husband had died just a few years earlier. She had no other children. The only child she had, she was forced to give away on that cold Belfast day in 1946.

They now visit regularly. But the situation is by no means perfect. Her mother is still ashamed of what happened all those years ago. She refuses to say who the father is. She has told no-one about her daughter. She introduces her to family and neighbours as a friend from Ireland. She says she will take the secret to her grave. The daughter regards the people who reared her as her real parents.

That young woman is my wife, Maura. I think the story is typical of the plight that befell hundreds of Irish women in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. I used it as the basis for my new novel, The Faloorie Man.

I have changed many of the details: the young girl has become a young boy; I set the novel in Ardoyne, where I grew up in north Belfast. As far as I know, no-one has ever set a novel in Ardoyne before.

I think the place deserves to be commemorated in some way. It has suffered terribly in the 30 years of the Troubles. Hundreds of people have been killed or imprisoned. Many of them were young boys I went to school with. Dozens of families have been driven from their homes.

But I have fond memories of Ardoyne, where it nestles in the shadow of Cave Hill and Divis mountain, in those years before the Troubles came and changed Belfast forever.

The Faloorie Man by Eugene McEldowney is published by New Island Books, price £9.99