Meghan Markle has recalled the terrifying moment her son Archie’s nursery caught fire while she was on a royal tour.
Speaking to Serena Williams on the premiere episode of her Archetypes podcast, the Duchess of Sussex revealed she and her husband Prince Harry had just landed in South Africa for their 2019 tour when they heard the news.
The former Suits star explained: “The moment we landed, we had to drop [Archie] off at this housing unit that they had had us staying in. He was going to get ready to go down for his nap.”
She continued: “We immediately went to an official engagement in this township called Nyanga, and there was this moment where I’m standing on a tree stump and I’m giving this speech to women and girls, and we finish the engagement.”
“We get in the car, and they say there’s been a fire at the residence. What? There’s been a fire in the baby’s room.”
Meghan said she and Harry then raced back to the residence and their “amazing nanny” Lauren was “in floods of tears”.
The 41-year-old continued: “She was supposed to put Archie down for his nap, and she just said, ‘You know what? Let me just go get a snack downstairs.’ And she was from Zimbabwe, and we loved that she would always tie him on her, her back with a mud cloth, and her instinct was like, ‘Let me just bring him with me before I put him down.’ “
“In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire. There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway went in, fire extinguished. He was supposed to be sleeping in there.”
The Duchess said everyone was “in tears” and “shaken” by the incident, but they had to leave for another scheduled engagement.
She said: “I was like, Can you just tell people what happened? And so much, I think, optically. The focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels.”
“And part of the humanizing and the breaking through of these labels and these archetypes and these boxes that we’re put into is having some understanding on the human moments behind the scenes that people might not have any awareness of and to give each other a break. Because we did — we had to leave our baby.”
“And even though we were being moved to another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement.”
Meghan and Harry tied the knot in May 2018, and they welcomed their son Archie the following year.
The couple welcomed their second child together, a daughter named Lilibet Diana, last June.
The Sussex family currently live in California, but are set to return to the UK next month for a string of charity events.
