Meghan Markle Recounts Terrifying Moment Fire Broke Out In Her Son’s Room Leaving Her ‘Shaken’
Meghan Markle is opening up about a terrifying moment a fire broke out in her son, Archie Harrison‘s nursery while the family were on tour in South Africa.
On the debut episode of her podcast Archetypes released Tuesday, the mother of two sat down with longtime friend and tennis champion, Serena Williams for a personal talk about ambition.
While speaking about their roles as mothers, the Duchess of Sussex tells Serena about the horror moment she was told Archie’s nursery had caught fire.
Meghan and her husband, Prince Harry were visiting the South African township of Nyaga when officials told Meghan “there was a fire in the baby’s room”.
Meghan had just finished giving a speech when she got the news.
“When we went on our tour to South Africa, we landed with Archie,” Meghan, 41, began.
“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.
“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?”
Meghan said she and Harry raced back to the residence to find their then nanny, named only as Lauren, “in floods of tears.” Meghan continues:
“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.”
She adds, “He was supposed to be sleeping in there.”
Meghan continues: “As a mother, you go, Oh, my God, what?
Meghan said everyone was “in tears” and “shaken” by the incident, but they had to leave for another scheduled engagement. She adds:
“Everyone’s in tears, everyone’s shaken. And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement.
“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.”
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Serena replied, “I couldn’t have done that. I would have said, ‘Uh-uh.’ “
Meghan then said on the podcast in a voiceover,
“These human moments behind the scenes, the ones under the surface… they’re everything. Because when we don’t swim in the shallow end, and instead choose to dive into the deep end, that’s when we gain a more nuanced understanding of each other.”
In the 57 minute-long show, Meghan and Serena also discuss “the double standard women face when they are labelled ‘ambitious'”, the description reads. Meghan says:
“Any woman, especially when they’re pregnant, you’re really vulnerable, and so that was made really challenging. And then when you have a newborn, you know. And especially as a woman, it’s a lot.
“So, you add this on top of just trying to be a new mom or trying to be a newlywed. It’s um…yeah. I guess, also thank you for asking because not many people have asked if I’m okay, but it’s a very real thing to be going through behind the scenes.”