When it comes to unexpectedly unsettling childhood anecdotes, Prue Leith might just have (forgive us) taken the cake. Per HuffPost, the Great British Bakeoff judge revealed in her new memoir, I’ll Try Anything Once, that her mother made her drown a litter of kittens when she was 11 years old. Despite Leith’s protests, she remembers her mother insisting, “Darling, it has to be done. They are only a few hours old. They will hardly know it’s happening.” Growing up on a farm in South Africa, Leith’s family often had too many kittens. Her mother, unable to find a new home for the latest batch, decided they had to die. “I held the bag under the water until the last kitten had stopped mewing,” Leith recalls, adding that the baby animals “fought like the devil for life.” Understandably, the restaurateur wrote that she was haunted by thoughts of dead kittens for weeks thereafter. In a statement, Leith told HuffPost she decided to write about the situation because it was “an extremely traumatic experience, not one I would forget,” despite it happening 70 years ago. To no one’s surprise, she also expressed her support for the neutering and spaying of pets.
