‘I went to the Holy Land - and came back with a tattoo’
Fern Britton found her trip to Jerusalem unexpectedly moving, so she decided to mark it forever, she tells Peter Stanford
We all like to bring home a keepsake from overseas trips, but not many of mature years choose to return with a tattoo. Except Fern Britton. While others typically step off the return flight from the holy city of Jerusalem clutching a prayer book or a religious statue, the erstwhile queen of the breakfast sofa had a cross inked on the inside of her wrist.
She was there for her BBC One documentary, Fern Britton’s Holy Land Journey, broadcast today to mark Good Friday. But her decision to get a souvenir she will never misplace was clearly no isolated moment of spiritual enthusiasm in the heady atmosphere of a city sacred to Christians, Jews and Muslims alike. Now back home in Buckinghamshire with her TV chef husband Phil Vickery and youngest child (of four), 15-year-old Winnie, Fern has no regrets.
Quite the opposite. She is rather proud of the slender, unadorned cross and is happy to show it off. “Simple and meaningful, so I won’t forget,” she explains. “That was the point. Before the age of air travel, going [to Jerusalem] used to be a once-ina-lifetime experience, and pilgrims would want some sign that they had made the effort. So they would have a tattoo, often on their wrist, and then, when they shook hands with others, people would know that they had been on a pilgrimage and, if they were shaking hands with other Christians, that they were among friends.”
So, in between walking in the footsteps of Jesus around the holy places in the city where, according to the gospels, he spent the last week of his life, 59-year-old Fern dropped in at Razzouk Ink, a 500-year-old family-run tattoo parlour, to examine the wooden blocks that had been used over the centuries to sketch out patterns on visitors’ flesh.
“I was in two minds about getting a tattoo when I first heard about the shop,” she admits, “but when I got there and knew it was, so to speak, kosher, I thought why not. When it was finished I could say, ‘I’m a real pilgrim now’.”
It wasn’t as if she was a novice. When her twins, Jack and Harry [by her first marriage to TV executive Clive Jones], turned 18 in 2011, they asked their mum if they could have tattoos. Her answer was to get one herself. “I thought it would show them how uncool it was, and that I would also be able to tell them that it hurt.”
But the ploy failed. The butterflies that she had inked on her tummy – “at my age, no one was going to be looking there, so I thought what did it matter” – did not hurt, nor put her boys off.
So what reaction did she get from the family to her cross? “My kids thought it was great, but my husband was a bit ‘grrrr’. He’ll get over it. The best reaction I got was from a friend who spotted it and asked, ‘Oh, is that your scar from the operation for Dupuytren’s contracture [claw hand]?’”
If her choice to allow Jerusalem to leave an indelible mark on her body is something that Fern is happy to joke about, its spiritual impact on her own “muddled and middling” Anglicanism has been much more profound.
There are those in the public eye who prefer to keep quiet about having a faith, following the “we don’t do God” PR maxim that Alastair Campbell famously laid down during his time in 10 Downing Street for his deeply religious boss, Tony Blair.
But part of Britton’s USP is her honesty about every aspect of her life, whether it be the rape she suffered as a 21-year-old, her struggle with depression during her first marriage, her suicide attempt or her decision, aged 40, to be confirmed in the Church of England.
“The only thing I ever tried to keep to myself was my gastric band,” she laughs, “and everybody found out about that anyway. So I’ve never had any fear of coming clean about my faith. I am not a very good Christian, but I am one none the less.”
Her own upbringing – her father was the film and TV actor Tony Britton – was not especially religious, though she did have a great grandfather who was an Anglican canon in Stroud. “In some ways I had a lonely childhood,” she says. “My sister was 10 years older, so I was by myself a lot. When I was nine or 10, I would take myself off every Sunday morning to our local church. Or better still, Evensong. I liked walking there in the dark, with the money I had been given to put in the collection. So faith has always been there.”
Her belated confirmation was “simply something I needed to do”. It came at a time when her first marriage wasn’t going well. “My twins were little and my daughter [Grace, now 19] had just been born. Our problems were causing us all a crisis, so I was praying a lot. I started helping to clean our local church. One of the other women there told me she was getting confirmed. I said, ‘Why don’t we do it together?’ It was as organic as that.”
Since she vacated the brightly coloured This Morning sofa in 2009, she has fronted eight series of Fern Britton Meets…, where she talks about faith to high-profile guests from Dolly Parton to Donny Osmond and the previously coy Tony Blair.
“I had always wanted to go to Jerusalem,” she reflects, “but had thought it was something I’d do later, after my children were off my hands. When I said yes to the programme, I’m not sure what I was expecting – some history, seeing familiar place names from the gospel story that we all think we know. I was probably worrying more about how hot it would be and what to wear.”
So it took her by surprise when, sitting at the Judgment Gate – where Jesus is believed to have emerged after he had been whipped and crowned with thorns, and from where he walked, carrying his cross, to Calvary to his death – tears sprang. “I felt as if I was in the Bible. I was on the set of Jesus’s life and I found myself thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, this is real.’ I’m not given to tears, but in that moment I could feel something. It might have been my brain playing tricks, but it was quite moving.”
One of the experts she interviews in the film, Dominican monk Father Gregory Tatum of Jerusalem’s Ecole Biblique, gave her some parting words of advice as she headed home. “He told me that I wouldn’t be able to process the feelings that I had had while I was there straightaway, that it would take me time. And he was right. My view of God has altered since I came back from Jerusalem.”
She no longer sees God, she explains, in terms of those Sunday school pictures from her childhood, as “an old man sitting on a cloud”. “What I experienced in Jerusalem is that God is innate in all human beings, if only you look carefully. Walking in the footsteps of those pilgrims who have been going there for almost 2,000 years, I realised that His love and kindness is there in essence in the bricks and mortar of the place.” And, even, by association, in the ink of her tattoo.
‘I’m not a very good Christian. But I am one none the less’