Aimee Walker
Meghan Markle has said in her podcast that her son, Archie, ‘escaped a bedroom fire’ during her South Africa tour with Prince Harry.
The 41-year-old recalled the terrifying incident – that took place in 2019 – when chatting to her friend, Serena Williams, on Archetypes.
She said: “When we went on our tour to South Africa, we landed with Archie.
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“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.”
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’. What?”
At this point in the podcast, Williams interjected, gasping: “Stop!”
Markle responded: “Oh my god, I can’t believe we have talked about this.”
Continuing her story, the Duchess of Sussex said she and her husband rushed back to their tour residence and their ‘amazing nanny Lauren’ was ‘in floods of tears’.
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Markle went on to say: “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 Lauren’s 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.”
Sounding emotional, the Duchess added: “He was supposed to be sleeping in there. And we came back, and of course, as a mother you go, ‘Oh, my god, what?’.
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“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 so much, I think, optically – 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.”
Concluding her story, Markle told Williams that she and Prince Harry continued with their tour despite the rocky start.
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