Meghan Markle Reveals Her Son's Nursery Caught On Fire During A 2019 Royal Tour In South Africa
Meghan Markle and her husband Prince Harry have garnered much attention over the last few years due to their decision to step down from their royal duties. But Meghan recently told a story in which her son's nursery caught on fire when she was on a royal tour in 2019.
Meghan and Harry have two children, Archie and Lilibet. Although the couple stepped down from their royal duties in early 2021, Meghan is sharing some stories of what life was like when they were still traveling around the world as members of the royal family. In a Spotify podcast with Serena Williams called "Archetypes," Meghan told a particularly scary story of the time in 2019 when her son's nursery caught on fire when she and Harry were at an event.
Meghan Markle Reveals Her Son's Nursery Caught on Fire During a 2019 Royal Tour in South Africa
The interview with Serena covered an array of topics, from Serena's career and retirement to Meghan's experiences as a royal. At one point, Meghan told a story about her son Archie's nursery catching on fire when they were in South Africa for a royal tour in 2019.
She and Harry traveled to South Africa with Archie, who was only four and a half months old at the time. They had to drop him off at a housing unit where they were staying before they left for an "official engagement" in a town called Nyanga.
"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,'" she recalled. "'What?"' "'There's been a fire in the baby's room.'" "What?'"
Meghan was in disbelief and they rushed back to the place where Archie was staying. The nanny Lauren was about to put Archie down for a nap when she decided to go get a snack downstairs. She brought him with her and in the meantime, "the heater in the nursery caught on fire."
Apparently there was no smoke detector and someone just happened to smell the smoke down the hallway and went in with a fire extinguisher. Luckily, Archie wasn't inside the nursery even though he was supposed to be sleeping in there.
"Everyone's in tears, everyone's shaken," she said. "And what do we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement?"
"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," she continued. "And even though we were being moved to another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement."
Serena says she "couldn't have done that" because it would have been too difficult for her. Meghan shrugged it off, "Oh well."