The Duchess of Sussex has spoken out about how her son escaped a fire in his bedroom while the family were on a royal tour of South Africa. The incident took place in 2019 while the Sussexes were visiting the country.
Meghan recounted the experience on her long-awaited Archetypes podcast, released on Spotify on Tuesday, in a conversation with her close friend, tennis star Serena Williams. She spoke of her distress after learning of the near-miss soon after delivering an empowering speech to girls in the Nyanga township in Cape Town, before rushing back to see Archie and then having to leave him to carry out another official engagement.
She said: “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.
Meghan added: “We came back. And, of course, 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’.”
The Sussexes had dropped their young son off at the housing unit they were staying in for a sleep straight after flying in for their official tour in 2019, with the couple then leaving to kick start their royal visit with their first engagement. Archie’s nanny at the time, named only as Lauren had taken him downstairs with her instead while she went to get a snack. It was then that the heater caught fire.
Meghan said: “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.”
She went on to explain how she was not allowed to tell people what happened. “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,” she said.
The duchess added: “We had to leave our baby… and even though we were being moved into another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement.”
Williams replies: “I couldn’t have done that.”
Later the same day, the couple had visited Cape Town’s historic District Six neighbourhood, met residents in its Homecoming Centre and heard from people who were forcibly removed to a township during the Apartheid era, with the Sussexes also carrying out an impromptu walkabout.
Meghan and Harry’s controversial African tour took place in the autumn of 2019, just months before they quit as senior working royals.
