Prue Leith is telling me what a bad mother she was to her daughter, Li-Da Kruger, growing up. I don’t believe her for a second, though she lists off reams of apparent offences. “I never stood on any touchlines, I never went to any swimming galas,” says Leith. “I once went to watch Li-Da rowing in a school competition and stood in a wet muddy field in the freezing rain with the wind howling, thinking about nothing other than a gin and tonic and how I was never going to do this again.” The Bake Off judge and restaurateur hoots with laughter. “So I’m not a good mother!”
On our three-way Zoom call, Kruger, now in her mid-40s and a film-maker, smiles and shakes her head. They have been thinking a lot about their relationship lately, while making a new documentary, Prue Leith: Journey With my Daughter. In it, they return to Cambodia, where Kruger was born, in an attempt to trace her relatives and learn more about her life before she was adopted by Leith and her late husband Rayne.
The couple adopted Kruger, their second child, at the age of one (they also had a son, Daniel). Kruger was a sickly baby, airlifted out of Phnom Penh shortly before the city fell to the genocidal Khmer Rouge. She had a loving, privileged childhood, but almost everyone in her life – including her family – was white.
“Wherever Li-Da went, she was always having to tell her story,” says Leith. “Although she came out of an English family and went to an English school, she didn’t look English.” Kruger has spent her adult life trying to reconnect with her Cambodian roots. “Understanding what it means to be Cambodian has been a lifelong challenge,” she says.
As the white mother to a Cambodian baby in the 1970s, Leith experienced occasional hostility. One woman accosted Leith in public to tell her that it was a “disgrace” that she had taken Kruger away from her culture. Another woman stepped in — ostensibly to Leith’s defence. “She said I was kind to have adopted her,” says Leith incredulously, “because she was ‘so plain and black’. I was so angry!”
In one affecting scene, the women meet Jimmy Jacks, an American pilot who flew Cambodian babies to their adoptive parents in the west in the 1970s. Jacks tells Kruger that he met the women giving their babies up for adoption and that they did it to save them from a murderous regime. “These mothers were giving up their children for a better life,” Leith says. “It was an act of absolute love.”
Knowing that she escaped the Khmer Rouge meant Kruger didn’t struggle with the feelings of rejection and abandonment common to many adopted children. Kruger’s birth parents most likely did not choose to give her up in any conventional sense: it was a question of survival. “Adopted people I know who don’t have this big epic horror story behind their adoption find it in some ways harder [to deal with],” Kruger says, “because it is about rejection and abandonment.”
This is not Kruger’s first attempt to trace her birth mother: she returned to Cambodia at the age of 27 with the same intention, making a documentary about it for ITV. Kruger explains that she felt compelled to give it another shot after going through the process of adopting a two-year-old boy. “I literally had to fill in this form with every address I’d ever lived at and the dates I left and why,” Kruger says. “And I suddenly realised that, actually, all those details really matter to me. They’ve always mattered. I wanted to be able to fill in the gaps of my own history for my son.”
Returning to Cambodia, Kruger was aware that she was unlikely to find her birth parents: the Khmer Rouge were responsible for the deaths of approximately one-quarter of Cambodia’s population in just four years. Even if her birth parents had survived, most records had been destroyed. But the journalist John Pilger, who helped draw the world’s attention to the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s, gave Kruger some invaluable advice. “He said: ‘Try to find as many concrete, tangible things from your past, even if you don’t find names of people,’” Kruger says. “‘Because it all helps validate your existence.’ That was the most important piece of advice I ever heard. It made me try to get the best out of what I’ve got to make sense of my past … all of it gives me a fuller picture and ultimately validates who I am.”
While in Cambodia, Leith and Kruger track down one woman, Hong Soth, who might be Kruger’s birth mother. Waiting for the results of DNA testing, Leith was torn. “I remember desperately hoping she was Li-Da’s mother, because I knew how important it was for Li-Da to find her,” she says “But part of me thought: Oh God, it’s not just Hong Soth, she has a whole family. I’ve had Li-Da for 45 years. Am I prepared for her to focus on the Cambodian side of her family, and see much less of her?’
DNA testing subsequently rules Hong Soth out, although not before she tells the women something disturbing: she never intended to give her baby up for adoption. Her baby was taken from her whilst she was hospitalised for depression. Did Leith worry that Kruger’s birth mother might similarly have been coerced into giving her up, against her will? “It’s tempting to overthink these things,” Leith responds. “But obviously, in war there are people who will exploit situations.”
Although this trip was not successful, it threw up some leads: DNA testing linked Kruger to a Cambodian village, and she is working with locals there to establish how she may be related to them. Leith has always supported Kruger in her efforts to find her birth parents. “You said the most amazing thing to me,” says Kruger, addressing her mother. “Before I first went to Cambodia. You said: ‘I support you 100% trying to find your birth parents, but just know that if you never come back, I am so privileged to have spent 27 years of your life with you.’”
For her part, Leith found the trip to Cambodia unexpectedly moving. During filming, the famously matter-of-fact chef was often moved to tears by the sight of small children. “The little ones looked so much like Li-Da when she was a baby,” says Leith. “I kept thinking, that was a bit of Li-Da’s life that I missed, and I wasn’t there for her, I was just happy with my little boy in England, and she was starving and her mother was probably being killed.” She shakes her famously bright spectacles from side to side. “Awful.”
Watching Leith and Kruger interact on camera, their bond is undeniably strong. What has life been like for Kruger since her mother stepped back into the spotlight to present Bake Off? “When I was really little, I felt that Mum was quite famous,” Kruger responds. “We would get stopped in the street, and people who were interested in cooking always knew who Mum was. But then Bake Off came along and it was extraordinary. Mum would be stopped in toilets for selfies. It was a whole new level.” Leith interjects. “Daniel was the one who has always been embarrassed by me.” Kruger shakes her head: “He’s proud now. We’ve both really proud. You deserve it.”
I grab the opportunity to ask Leith about Bake Off. When filming resumes, post-coronavirus, one of the hosts, Sandi Toksvig, is set to be replaced by the comedian Matt Lucas, having surprised audiences by exiting the much-loved Channel 4 show. Leith squashes rumours that Toksvig had been unhappy on Bake Off for a while. “I know her very well and I know she’s a great actress, but you can’t look that merry without it being real,” Leith says.
Leith is talking to me from what looks like a well-stocked kitchen: behind her, I can see glass jars of spaghetti and grains. Across the nation, as we speak, neighbours are furtively swapping sourdough starters. Does Leith have any tips for those embracing cooking for the first time? “My tip would be to get a really simple cookbook and just do what it says,” she says seriously. “Nothing too fancy or written by a really classy chef. It won’t necessarily look perfect or be perfect, but it will work.”
Every story about adoption has another life implicit within it: the life that was not led, the family that was not your own, the path that was not followed. “That could have been you,” observes Leith to Kruger, pointing to a Cambodian street vendor during their travels. “I’ve spent my life trying to close the gap between those two lives,” says Kruger. “The life I live now, and the life that could have been.” Seeing mother and daughter together on film, it seems Li-Da ended up exactly where she belonged.
Prue Leith: Journey with my Daughter is on Tuesday 14 April, 9pm, Channel 4
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