In the debut episode of Meghan Markle’s podcast Archetypes, she revealed to her guest and longtime friend Serena Williams that during her visit to Africa with Prince Harry in 2019, a fire broke out in their son Archie’s nursery.
“When we went on our tour to South Africa, we landed with Archie,” Meghan explained via People.
“Archie was what, four and a half months old. And the moment we landed, we had to drop him off at this housing unit that they had had us staying in.”
She continued to recall the scary experience.
“He was going to get ready to go down for his nap. 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.’ What?”
When they raced back to their home, Meghan said their “amazing nanny” Lauren was “in floods of tears.”
Meghan 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.”
Meghan then revealed that after the scary incident, “we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement.” Serena then replied, “I couldn’t have done that. I would have said, ‘Uh-uh.'”
Meghan and Prince Harry famously stepped away from their royal duties as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex just a year after this incident, in January 2020.
(Source: iHeartRadio)
