Meghan Markle reveals horrifying moment fire broke out in son Archie’s nursery
Meghan Markle has relived the horror moment a FIRE broke out in son Archie’s nursery while the family were on tour in South Africa.
The long-awaited first episode of Meghan’s podcast Archetypes dropped yesterday – nearly two years after the Sussexes signed their rumoured £18m mega-deal with Spotify.
In it, the Duchess of Sussex tells her pal Serena Williams about the horror moment she was told Archie’s nursery had caught ablaze in 2019.
Meghan and Harry were visiting the South African township of Nyanga when officials told Meghan “there was a fire in the baby’s room”.
The couple raced to their son to find their then-nanny – named only as Lauren – in tears.
Meghan said: “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.
“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…
“We finish the engagement, we get in the car and they say, ‘There’s been a fire at the residence. There’s been a fire in the baby’s room’.
She adds: “We get back, and our amazing nanny Lauren is in floods of tears.
“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 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.”
Meghan continues: “As a mother, you go, ‘Oh, my God, what?’
“Everyone’s in tears, everyone’s shaken. And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement.
“I said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense. Can you just tell people what happened?’ And I think the focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels.
“And part of the humanising 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.”
In the show, the Duchess of Sussex also reveals how her life changed when she joined the Firm – claiming she had “felt the negativity” of being labelled “ambitious”.
In the episode, the Meghan says: “So, I don’t remember ever personally feeling the negative connotation behind the word ambitious until I started dating my now husband.
“And um, apparently ambition is, uh… a terrible, terrible thing, for a woman that is – according to some.
“So, since I’ve felt the negativity behind it, it’s really hard to un-feel it.
“I can’t unsee it, either, in the millions of girls and women who make themselves smaller – so much smaller – on a regular basis.”
Meghan and her husband Harry split from the Royal Family and moved to America in 2020.