Personal stuff

	Good Bye Dolly Gray, the story of the Boer War

In 1974 I married Rayne Kruger, the South African writer. He’d written seven novels and a clutch of non-fiction books, among them Good Bye Dolly Gray, the story of the Boer War, which is still in print after 50 years. I had a bad effect on him, I’m sorry to say, slowing his writing to near zero by dragging him into my catering business.  He became my Chairman and Finance Director. Just as well, since I still add up on my fingers.

We had Daniel, and then adopted Li-Da, a waif from war-torn Cambodia. She was 17 months when she arrived and Daniel was a year. Her story, still touches me: when she was grown up, she went back to Cambodia to research her past and made a documentary, Belonging, which still has me blubbing.

Click here to read synopsis and buy the Belonging article by Li-Da Kruger

	Husband Rayne Kruger, Prue & children Daniel & Li-Da at home, 1978

Click here to read article on 'Bridging the gap' ( 291kb)

Two two-year-olds, both prone to tantrums, were pure hell in London. Li-Da would lie on her back and scream, mouth open and Daniel would lie on his tummy and bang his head on the floor. But in the Park they were as sunny and lovely as toddlers in a nappy commercial.

So we bought a house in the country, with a great big garden.

Click here to read article on 'Prue Leith blossoms' ( 291kb)

Li-Da makes television documentaries, and Daniel works for David Cameron as a speechwriter and Policy wonk. I’m disgustingly proud of them both.

We all have separate flats in the same house in Notting Hill Gate, but I try to be in Oxfordshire more than in town. My office is there, with the wonderful Francisca, and I love the garden, and my mad dog Meg (she’s a rescue mongrel with, I swear, attention deficit disorder – I should put her on ritalin), and my extraordinarily beautiful cat Magnificat (known as Mags) who is a “Bengal tiger”, (or, more correctly seven-eighths Abyssinian with one eighth Asian Leopard cat) 

Mags		Meg

Rayne, who was 20 years older than me, died five years ago, and I found that pretty grim. When the Mail on Sunday asked me to write about widowhood, I thought at first I could not, but in fact it helped. 

Rayne

	All Under Heaven Book Jacket

I remember the first time I felt really happy after his death was when I got in to find on my desk an advance copy of my latest novel, next to an advance copy of Rayne’s All Under Heaven, a history of China that he’d taken 40 odd years to complete, and which was accepted by a publisher on the back of his fulsome obituaries which reminded people just what a good writer he had been before he married me.  The co-incidence of the two books, side by side, was wonderful.

Five years later, I have a “new best friend” Ernest Hall, who is worth a Google on his own. He’s a pianist (I cannot sing a note) and an entrepreneur, and he’s wonderful. I confessed to this late romance (I am 67 and he is 77) on Fi Glover’s Saturday Live the other day, and asked listeners what to call him. “Partner” sounds like a deal, I am too old for a “boyfriend” and “mate” and “companion”  are just awful. My favourite listener’s suggestion was “your sous-chef”. So that’s what he is. 

My Sous Chef, Sir Ernest Hall

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