The remarkable story of how a Kent woman was reunited with her 57-year-old son after he was adopted as a baby will feature on tonight's episode of the hit ITV show Long Lost Family.

Presenters Nicky Campbell and Davina McCall will guide viewers through the story of Derbyshire-raised John Hacking who has been searching for his birth mum, Maureen Clifford, since he was 17.

The story starts with John hoping to find out why he was abandoned as a baby.

John, who now has a daughter and granddaughter of his own, and lives with his partner Helen, was brought up by his adoptive parents, Derek and Dorothy Hacking, who found him outside their flat in Buxton, Derbyshire.

When John was 13, Derek told him he was adopted and recounted the circumstances in which they had taken him in off the street.

Returning to where he was left, for the show, John said: “My father found me in the pram parked outside these gates here. I was about three months of age. That’s the story I got told.”

All John’s father told him was that his birth mother was a neighbour of his at the time, called Maureen Clifford, and she had suddenly disappeared without a trace.

But, more than 50 years on, he has questions he needs answering, including why his mother left him. John has been searching for her since he was 17 with no success, so he turned to Long Lost Family for help.

In many cases when a child is left as a baby, it can be hard to find any clues to their identity. But, although John was found in a pram, he did know the name of his missing birth mother.

Despite her marrying twice, the team was able to track her down to the Isle of Sheppey.

During the show, Nicky travels to meet Maureen, 77, who was recently widowed and now lives on her own. She tells Nicky about the desperate situation she was in when John was born.

“I was living in this room. It was just a little square and it was a hovel. It was disgusting, that place. And I was desperate,” she said.

Having had a bad experience growing up in care herself, Maureen’s fear was that the authorities would take her son away.

“I knew if they came, they only had to look at the place I was living in and they would have took him,” she said. “I wasn’t having that ‘cos then he would have been stuck in a home. One thing that I didn’t want was him going into a home.”

When Nicky asks whether she had really left her son in a pram, he learns that she had but, crucially, she did not just abandon him: Maureen knew John’s adoptive parents and she made them his godparents.

They had told Maureen they would look after John if she ever felt she couldn’t, and that time came.

Maureen recalls: “We arranged to meet. I said I would come up and bring him up but I didn’t have the guts to hand him over. I just left the pram there outside their flat, and I fled.”

Maureen never had any more children and, with John back in her life, she’s now a great-grandmother. For her, this is a “wish come true”.

She tells Nicky: “I’ve never forgotten him. He is always in my mind. I always imagined I would open the door and there’d be a young man standing there and saying, ‘do you know who I am?’”

John is lost for words when Davina delivers the good news that his mother been found, and he can finally get some answers.

Less than a week later, John travels to Sheppey, with his partner Helen, to meet Maureen for the first time since he was a baby.

After a big hug, Maureen tells John: “I’ve never forgotten you darling, never, never – you’re exactly as I imagined. I didn’t want to hand you over, but it was a matter of having to.”

John said: “It’s a weight off my shoulders all these years of trying to find my mother and it’s finally happened.”

Watch the full episode on ITV tonight at 9pm.

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