Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
TV Fern: My gran’s anguish over her secret baby boy...
Hidden child got in touch after seeing Britton on TV
TV presenter Fern Britton has revealed her grandmother had a secret child she kept hidden from the family for decades.
The former This Morning star said the “guilty secret” has had such a profound impact on her it became the inspiration for her new novel.
She revealed she had an uncle who her grandmother, Beryl, gave birth to out of wedlock – with Fern only finding out about him when he got in touch after she first achieved fame.
The 62-year-old said: “I was 23 when I found out.
“I had started in TV, working in Plymouth, when I received a letter from a man who had seen me on screen, asking if I was Ruth Britton’s daughter.
“When I wrote back to say that I was, he replied saying, ‘I know this sounds extraordinary, but I think I am your mother’s half-brother’. The stranger was telling me that my late grandmother, Beryl, had given birth to him out of wedlock before the First World War, and he had spent years searching for his mother.
“In secret, Beryl had arranged a private fostering for him and continued to see him, love him, and send whatever money she could spare. It must have been very difficult, because by then she had married my grandfather, Gerald, and went on to have three children.”
Fern said she struggled to pick the right moment to tell her mum, but when she did break the bombshell, her mum said, “I’m not surprised”.
Speaking to Good Housekeeping magazine, Fern added: “She told me that when my grandmother was dying, she had told her, ‘I’ve been a very wicked woman, I have done wicked things’.
“It seemed awful to find out that she had carried this guilty secret around.”
Fern’s new novel, Daughters of Cornwall, is out later this month.
It is about a woman who gives birth to a secret child.