Prue Leith: A mother’s love
Bake Off host Prue Leith opens up about the emotional journey she embarked on to help her adopted daughter uncover the truth about her past…
BakeOff judge Prue Leith has spoken movingly about a trip to Cambodia, the birth country of her adopted daughter, Li-Da. ‘Li-Da had an increasing desire to know about her birth family,’ Prue explained. ‘And as I get older, I want to know that I did everything I should have as her mother. Maybe it was time to lay those ghosts to rest.’
Accompanied by a film crew, mum and daughter set off in an attempt to trace Li-Da’s birth mother. Now 46 and a mum herself, Li-Da had escaped the Cambodian civil war when she was just a baby and knows nothing about her biological parents.
Prue, 80, and her late husband, Rayne, adopted Li-Da when she was 16 months old. A sickly child, she was airlifted out of Phnom Penh just before a mass killing began in the city that fell to the rule of Pol Pot and the brutal Khmer Rouge. The genocidal regime is thought to have slaughtered a quarter of the population.
The successful cook had heard of a little Cambodian girl being fostered by a French family who could no longer care for her. When Prue learnt she needed a mother, she rushed to Paris and, five months later, Li-Da was living with her in England. ‘Adoption was so easy in the Seventies,’ she recalls simply.
Prue and Rayne took Li-Da back to their Cotswolds home, to be a sister to their son, Daniel, now an MP. ‘I didn’t dwell on Li-Da’s cultural roots,’ Prue admits. ‘I just brought her home and thought, she is English now. I’ve always believed that all children need to grow up is buckets and buckets of love.’
In Cambodia, Prue was moved to tears by the sight of tiny children. ‘The babies here remind me of little Li-Da,’ she explained. ‘I was happy with my boy in England, and she was starving and her mother was probably being killed.’
One of the reasons Li-Da embarked on her journey was that she herself has gone through the adoption process, and is now a mother to a young son, after treatment for breast cancer left her unable to conceive. The emotional process left her wanting to learn as much as she could about her past. ‘I wanted to be able to fill in the gaps of my own history for my son.’
Asked at one point how she feels about her removal from Cambodia, Li-Da says simply she is grateful. ‘The reason I’m alive is the kindness of strangers,’ she says.
One thing throughout remains a certainty, though – ‘I’m her mum,’ said Prue. ‘And whether she finds her birth family or not, she knows
I love her and that is never going to change.’