Fern Britton: ‘There were so many secrets when I was growing up’

The TV presenter talks about the inspiration behind her new novel set in Cornwall.

Fern Britton talks about her family secrets and the inspiration behind her new novel, A Cornish Legacy (Harper Collins/PA)

Fern Britton is best known for her years on daytime television, but over the past decade she’s built a quieter career as a novelist down in Cornwall.

In her latest book, A Cornish Legacy, Britton draws on her life to explore themes of divorce, inheritance and the emotional weight of old houses.

“It started with this idea of a house – not a particular one,” Britton says, “but that kind of romantic, magical mystery stuff of Cornwall. You know, where the air is a thin veil to the next world.” It’s an atmospheric setting, but it also lets her dig into themes of loss, identity and starting again, drawn in part from her own life and observations of changing rural communities.

Fern Britton lives and writes in North Cornwall (Fern Britton/PA)

“Friendship is everything,” she says. “Nobody has a lot of friends – that’s silly – but I’ve got maybe about seven or eight really good women. They’re just like those best naughty friends you had at school.”

Britton is speaking from Cornwall, where she’s lived full-time for the past few years – though her connection to the place goes much further back.

“We always came down here – my mum, my sister, my grandmother […] it was our family nucleus,” she says. “That magic in me – it was there from then. When I was old enough to know that Cornwall wasn’t just a place for holidays, I was determined to live here.”

It’s this enduring attachment that underpins much of her writing. Her latest novel centres on Delia, a woman who unexpectedly inherits a faded estate in the county. But, as with most of Britton’s fiction, the deeper story lies in the emotional undertones of complex relationships and the people we choose to save – and be saved by.

“I’ve been sitting in my house in Cornwall doing it up over the last few years,” she says. “Every day a little something more happens, and you think, yes, it’s starting to feel like a proper home now. And that was the same for Delia. All she did was put one foot after another and put her head down.

“That is also me. That is what I’ve done.”

There are shades of autobiography throughout, although Britton is careful to point out that she writes fiction. Still, she doesn’t shy away from drawing on personal experience – including romantic misadventures and family revelations that arrived far later in life than expected.

“There were so many secrets when I was growing up,” she says. “For instance, I never grew up with my father and didn’t know what had happened. He told me when I was in my 50s that he’d left my mum and sister, but on a visit home, he jumped back into bed with my mum. By the time he was finished and gone, I was conceived.”

That experience – of realising an entire branch of her family tree had been quietly buried – still stays with her. “Everybody in the family must have known what happened, but nobody told me.”

It wasn’t the only shock. “My mum and my dad divorced when I was very young, and she focused all her energy on me,” Britton says. “And also my grandmother – she had a child out of wedlock in 1914. We never knew. Then, one day, when I was working in TV down here, I got a letter from a man saying he was my mum’s half-brother. He was the boy my grandmother had to give away.”

Britton now feels a responsibility to be totally open with her own children. “My children – I have got no surprises for them, nothing,” she says. “I’ve probably told them too much!”

If family history is one kind of inheritance, then home – or the loss of it – is another. Britton recalls arriving in Cornwall for work in the early 1980s and being able to buy a small house for £15,000 with a 100% mortgage.

“That was the beginning,” she says. “But now it’s all got so high in price. When Covid started, it all went mad, and now those houses are going back on the market for too much money, and no one can afford them.”

She’s noticed the change in tone too – a tension between locals and second-home owners, especially as properties sit empty through the winter.

But for Britton, Cornwall isn’t a bolt-hole. “People often say, ‘Oh, you must be back in London now’. And I say, ‘No, I’m in Cornwall all the time.’ And when you’re on your own on a beach in the middle of February, and it’s a beautiful, bright day, you just think – wow – the others are missing this.”

Romantic complications also surface in Britton’s novel, particularly through Delia, who inherits the house from her ex-husband.

“It was a kind of helpful device, really,” Britton says. “Generally, when people are looking to save themselves, they go and save somebody else […] and together, you save each other.”

Her perspective on relationships has naturally changed over time, particularly through watching her daughters – who are now in the 20s – navigate dating in the modern world.

“In the Seventies and Eighties, people just asked you out, there wasn’t more thought put into it,” she says.

“But now, this narcissistic personality has actually been addressed and given a name, given an understanding.” She recalls a friend’s toxic relationship: “He was so clever – making her feel adored, and then picking fights, and it was all her fault. But it wasn’t. I think that’s very interesting.”

There’s no big message of A Cornish Legacy, no moral neatly tied up, but in the background, there’s a quiet, persistent thread: people muddling through, weathering heartbreak and making peace with the past – or at least trying to.

For Britton, that thread runs close to the bone. “Writing lets me sit quietly with all the noise,” she says, “and Cornwall – well, it’s just the bit of me that feels like home.”