Meghan Markle is reliving one of the most terrifying moments of her life. The Duchess of Sussex recalled to guest Serena Williams on the premiere episode of her Archetypes podcast the moment that she and her husband, Prince Harry, learned the nursery where their then-infant son Archie was staying had caught on fire.
The couple had landed in South Africa for their 2019 tour with Archie, now 3, and had to drop off their son at a housing unit they were staying in 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,” Markle recalled. “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.”
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Markle, who is also mother to 14-month-old daughter Lilibet with the Duke of Sussex, continued that when they rushed back to the housing unit, they learned their nanny had decided to take Archie with her to grab a snack in the kitchen. “In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire,” Markle revealed. “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.”
Despite the terrifying experience, the family made the difficult choice to move forward with their public obligations. It’s a perfect example of why Markle said she wants to show a more “human” side to public figures, especially women, in her podcast. “So much, I think, optically-the focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels,” she explained. “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.”
