One of the judges from “The Great British Baking Show” revealed a disturbing story from her childhood which involved drowning a bag of kittens while she was living on a farm.
Prue Leith recounted the gruesome incident in her new memoir, “I’ll Try Anything Once,” People reported. The 82-year-old reality competition star was allegedly asked by her mother to help kill the hours-old kittens.
“My mother and I, then 11, had just drowned some kittens… and for weeks I imagined those poor dead creatures,” Leith recalled in the book. “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.”
The competition show judge said that she tried to stop her mother from killing the newborn cats but she was “met with a firm, ‘Darling, it has to be done. They are only a few hours old. They will hardly know it’s happening.'”
However, Leith remembers how the kittens “fought like the devil for life” as she “held the bag under the water until the last kitten had stopped mewing.”
“The Great British Baking Show” judge told The Huffington Post why she chose to include the story in her memoir despite potential backlash.
“This happened in the early 1940′s, when I was 11 years old, being brought up on a farm in South Africa,” she said in a statement shared with HuffPo. “I wrote about it honestly in my book, as an 11-year-old it was an extremely traumatic experience, not one I would forget, however it is what happened 70 years ago.”
“Thankfully today in the UK we have the choice of neutering our cats and have more options to home kittens, although sadly in some parts of the world it is still an issue,” she continued.
Leith’s revelations come on the heels of another shocking memoir, this one from former child star Jennette McCurdy. In her recent release, “I’m Glad My Mother Died,” McCurdy described how her mother’s controlling behavior and obsession with fame affected her childhood.
“My earliest memories of childhood were of heaviness, and chaos,” the actress told People magazine last year. “My mom’s emotions were so erratic that it was like walking a tightrope every day. The mood fluctuations were daily.”
“My mom had always dreamt of being a famous actor and she became obsessed with making me a star,” she explained.