Getting old is not supposed to be fun. But Prue Leith is having a ball. The author and chef talks to Deana Luchia about loving the later years...
When Prue Leith appears on Zoom wearing her trademark chunky jewellery and brightly framed glasses, she’s immediately chatty, fun and down to earth.
She breezily waves off an interruption from her husband, John – who is keen to tell her about a spillage in the kitchen – informs me that exercise is “too boring and takes up too much time” and cheerfully answers my questions on love, sex, grief and assisted dying – just a few of the themes of her wise new book: Being Old...and learning to love it.
Prue’s decision earlier this year to step away from being a judge on The Great British Bake Off (a role she’d held since 2017) led to headlines about her retirement.
Prue Leith
But that’s not what she’s doing at all, she tells me – she simply wants her summers back.
“We don’t have to retire if we don’t want to,” insists the 86-year-old.
So, from now on, she’ll do other things for Bake Off, but not the 10 long weeks of annual filming.
In the meantime, she’s busy promoting Being Old and, this month, she will appear at the Well Read Literary Festival at Wasing, in Berkshire, to talk about embracing and celebrating old age.
With numerous cookbooks, eight novels, an autobiography and myriad articles under her belt, Prue is already a prolific author. But what inspired her to write a book about ageing?
“I was getting quite irritated by so many of my old friends saying: ‘Old age is shit, isn’t it?’ I kept thinking: Actually, we’re all having a pretty good time, and I’m perfectly happy. I wanted to say that old age isn’t rubbish.”
Of course, there are aches and pains.
“I’m never without a packet of paracetamol in my pocket because I never know which bit of me is going to ache next,” she admits. “But we’re living much longer. There are all sorts of advances in medicine and drugs that make life a bit more bearable. We have lots of advantages that other generations of oldies didn’t have.”
The best thing about being older, she says, is not caring what others think.
“You don’t give a toss, you really don’t. Before, if I was doing an interview or something, I’d think: Oh my God, I shouldn’t have said that! Oh, I swore. Oh, that won’t look good in print. And now I think, who cares?”
It’s at this point that her husband interrupts our call. He, too, is jovial and chatty, and I like him instantly. The pair married in 2016, when Prue was 76, and John was 70. It’s Prue’s second marriage.
Her first husband, Rayne Kruger – 20 years her senior and, like her, a native South African – died in 2002. They’d been together for around 40 years. Did falling in love and lust again, in her seventies, come as a surprise?
“When Rayne died, he’d been ill for the last 15 years, so there wasn’t a lot of physical love going on. I so adored him, and we were so close that I didn’t feel the lack of it. I assumed that was the end of romance and physical love, and it was absolutely fine. I was busy, I was working and had a lot to do, and I was having fun. I just didn’t miss it.
“And then about four years after Rayne’s death, and quite suddenly, I fell in love with a guy. The affair didn’t last, but it was exactly like being 17. It makes no difference that you’re 70. You feel all the ridiculous teenage things of ‘Will he ring me?’ and ‘Shall I dare text him?’”
She met John, a retired fashion designer, as she was heading off to Canada for a two-week book tour.
“And the whole trip, he didn’t get in touch. I felt just like a kid, wondering whether to text him. I’d write something and then think: No, that sounds too forward. I’d better not say that.
“Finally, on my last day in Canada, he texted me and said: ‘Can you come to dinner? I know you’re coming home tomorrow.’ I couldn’t sleep at all on the plane. I kept thinking this absolutely teenage thing of: I must go to sleep or I’ll look like hell in the morning, but I can’t because I’m so excited.”
Prue moved to London in 1960 to pursue a career in catering. She attended the Cordon Bleu Cookery School before starting businesses that included Leith’s – a Michelin-starred restaurant in Notting Hill – and culinary schools here and in South Africa. Best known for Bake Off, she has worked on TV since the 1970s, but it’s writing she enjoys the most. Her favourite of her own novels is The Gardener.
Prue Leith
“It’s about a clash of attitudes and tastes,” she says, “but of course there’s a bit of bonking in the potting shed. I like writing sex scenes. You just have to channel your inner lust and do it.”
Getting Old was written in a sprint-like three months.
“I write anywhere. In the train, on planes. If I’m at a boring party, I’ll go off to the loo and sit on the seat. I was once sitting at a dressing table in the rather grand loos of The Sloane Club. Suddenly, the club secretary put his head around the door and said, ‘No computers are allowed in the club.’ And I said: ‘No men are allowed in the ladies' room.’ Then I went into one of the cubicles and shut the door to finish my chapter.”
Since the painful death of her older brother, David, from bone cancer, Prue has become a high-profile campaigner for assisted dying.
“The hospital drug trolley used to come around every four hours, but they only gave David enough morphine to last for three. So, in every four hours, there was one when he was in terrible pain.”
Her requests for more morphine were turned down, she says, on the grounds that it might kill him.
“I said: ‘He’s dying anyway. You’ve given him three weeks to live, but he would like it to be one day. Why are you insisting that he goes through three weeks of agony?’”
In contrast, her younger brother, Jamie, died “beautifully in bed at home”.
“We all had time with him and we remember it with sadness, but also with a great deal of love and happiness that we had that time together. For goodness sake, if you’re choosing between those two deaths, which would you have?”
Writer, broadcaster, campaigner: what does she do to relax?
“Every window of this house looks out onto the countryside,” she says of her Cotswold home. “So I have a terrace outside our bedroom. It’s very private up there. When it’s sunny, you can lie in the hammock, stark naked, and get a tan.”
Growing old has never sounded so much fun.
- Being Old...and learning to love it, by Prue Leith, is published by Short Books (paperback circa £10)
- Prue Leith will be at the Well Read Literary Festival on June 14; wasing.co.uk/festivals/wellread
