Dame Prue Leith, 82, recalls 'traumatic' childhood moment she drowned a bag of kittens

express.co.uk:

The Great British Bake Off judge Prue Leith has recalled the tale in all its gruesome detail, writing that she and her mother lowered a bag of baby cats into some water just hours after their birth.She said that the 11 little creatures didn’t fight for very long before they stopped meowing.

Prue told how her mother decided that was the best course of action, as she was unable to find homes for yet another litter of kittens.“My mother and I, then 11, had just drowned some kittens… and for weeks I imagined those poor dead creatures,” she wrote in her new book, I’ll Try Anything Once.“Too many kittens was a frequent occurrence and there had come a day when my mother, unable to find homes for yet another litter, decided to drown the latest batch.“'My protests were met with a firm, ‘Darling, it has to be done.They are only a few hours old.They will hardly know it’s happening'.”Despite her protests, Prue added that her mother said they only needed to hold the bag of kittens under the water for a short time to send them to “sleep” but that they “fought like the devil for life”.Although her mother then had doubts about her own actions, by that point it was too late and she had to keep holding the bag under the water until the bitter end.Prue’s kitten story is just one of many from her new book, another of which involves her nearly giving food poisoning to 30 people when her catering company Leith's Good Food, catered an event.Cooking up an unsavoury chicken mayonnaise, the star left a whopping 28 people in hospital.Prue explained that one man became so critically ill that he “could have ended up in a morgue!”Speaking openly about the event which soon went “disastrously wrong” during her Nothing In Moderation tour, which played.