The memory of having her baby, also called Margaret, snatched from her shortly after giving birth has scarred the grandmother for life.
Speaking from her home in Rainham, which she shares with her second husband Phil, she opened her heart to KentOnline about her decades of misery and guilt.
After she was born in Tottenham, north London, she was adopted by John and Dorothy Trent when she was 11 months old.
The couple, who lived in Gillingham and had another adopted child, Michael, who was seven years older than Margaret, were fiercely religious.
They belonged to a Temperance sect promoting total abstinence of alcohol and drugs, and John was a Methodist preacher at local churches.
Much of her early years revolved around other families following the same beliefs and Sunday school outings.
As Margaret reached her teens and started mixing with other girls at secondary school, she started to question her strict upbringing.
She said: “I had a very happy, warm and safe childhood. There was a lot of fun. I was in a happy bubble.
“But then puberty kicked in and I started asking questions and getting argumentative.”
Margaret began to envy her friends going out dancing at discos, staying over for sleepovers and sharing bottles of beer at the nearby recreation ground.
She started to sneak out and hang around them, mixing with boys, and then she met a boy “who became more than a friend” – and she got pregnant.
She said: “I was terrified. I was in total denial.
“At first, I saw I had put on a bit of weight and there were other physical signs.”
Mum Dorothy noticed she had piled on a few pounds and accompanied her to the family doctor, who announced she was four and a half months with child- halfway into a full term of a normal pregnancy.
Margaret said: “My mother was horrified. She would not allow me to sit next to her on the bus home and when we got off, I had to walk on the other side of the road. I was called awful names.”
From then on, the anxious teenager was banished to her room with little contact with the outside world as her embarrassed parents tried to hush up their daughter’s condition.
As the birth date approached in November 1970, Margaret was removed to a “remote” mother and baby home near Bearsted, Maidstone, where she was required to carry out menial tasks for her board and lodging.
Heavily pregnant Margaret worked in the laundry, covering for another young woman’s work who was expecting twins.
She said: “It was heavy work involving lifting racks of damp clothes.
“I suffered a placental abruption and was rushed to the hospital.”
Margaret underwent lifesaving medical treatment, including blood transfusions, before giving birth at the end of November.
She said: “I was allowed to hold the baby, and I bonded with her. And it was the first time I bonded with my birth mother because I imagined I was going through what she went through.”
On her adoptive father’s suggestion, she called her daughter Margaret because it would have “no special meaning” in the three weeks she was allowed to hold on to her.
Slowly, Margare’s life moved on. She became an accomplished seamstress and managed to get by and make a living.
After several relationships, she got married and had a daughter, Marina, with whom she has a close relationship and is “extremely proud” of.
The marriage broke up after seven years, and she reluctantly had to move back with the Trents.
She said: “It’s the last thing I wanted to do. I would have slept on a park bench, but I had a daughter to look after.”
After benefiting from an insurance policy windfall, she managed to scrape enough to buy a small house near The Strand in Gillingham.
“For the first time, I felt I had got my life on track,” she said.
It was then she spotted a dating advert placed by Phil in the KM Extra, a free paper distributed across Medway at the time.
Phil, now aged 75, described himself as a father of three, a former bank manager and estate agent, whose 22-year-old marriage had broken down.
Over the years, she had programmed herself to try and block Margaret out of her life, but as her 21st birthday approached, curiosity got the better of her.
“I contacted social services, and they put me in touch. I wrote to her, I just wanted to know she was alive and well.
“To my surprise, she replied with a brief resume of her life.
“I was in the kitchen when I opened it and burst into tears.”
Margaret and her daughter, who was given a new name by her adoptive family, met up in a pub in Hartlip, and they remain in touch with each other.
It was about this time that Phil proposed to her, and they tied the knot in July 1998 at Gads Hill Place, Higham.
In recent years, she has become heavily involved in the Movement for an Adoption Apology (MAA),a group of women and their adopted children who are urging the UK government for a retrospective apology for the violation of human rights and psychological trauma caused by forced adoption..
She is also in the process of having her memoirs published, covering the dark days of her earlier life.
An estimated 250,000 women, most of them unmarried teenagers, were coerced into having their babies adopted between 1949 and 1976.
Many were sent to mother and baby homes run by religious, state or charitable bodies where they were made to feel shame and guilt.
Two weeks ago,(July 17), Margaret joined dozens of people at a protest at Westminster demanding a formal government apology recommended by a human rights joint committee.
The Welsh and Scottish governments have already complied, and the UK’s Department for Education has said it took the issue “extremely seriously”, describing forced adoption as an “abhorrent practice”.
Margaret said: “I’ve not led the life I should have. I lost my self-esteem. For over 40 years, I hated myself.
“I have realised why I am doing this, all of it. It’s because I don’t want to end up a deeply unhappy old lady with many unresolved issues.
“Through the MAA, I have learnt some very sad stories. Some ladies are becoming frail, elderly and resigned to some awful memories in their heads.
“This must never happen again.”
