A WORCESTER-born man adopted as a baby has found his natural mother after a plea in the Evening News.

Simon Hawkins spoke to Thelma at the weekend.

The delighted 32-year-old says his three children are already calling her 'nan' and he plans to meet family members soon.

Within hours of Saturday's appeal, he received a call from his Uncle Alan, of Hawkins Builders, in Worcester.

"A voice said 'Is that Simon? It's your Uncle Alan here'," said Simon, who was adopted as a youngster by a Redditch family and now lives in Portsmouth.

He looks so much like his uncle that the latter was inundated with calls from friends who had seen the paper.

He then called his mother, who lives in Ireland, and has four more children.

"I said 'Hello mum' and she just started crying," he said.

Since then, he has spent hours on the phone to his mother - who was 15 when she gave birth to him at Worcester's Ronkswood Hospital - and has started to piece together a picture of the family he has never known.

"Mum went on to marry the boyfriend she was going out with at the time of my adoption," said Mr Hawkins. "He wanted to take me on. But unfortunately, by then, the six week cooling-off period had elapsed and they couldn't get me back.

"Years later, my sister started to track me down. But they came up against a brick wall and my mum got jittery because she thought I might not want to know her."

At one point as a child, Simon spent time living at Victoria Street Hostel in Barbourne, Worcester, just 200 yards away from one relatives.

"I was so near but so far," he said. "Mum said she had a vision about five months ago that this would happen, that we'd be reunited, and it seems that vision has come true."