Meghan reveals she had to continue royal tour after son's room caught fire in 2019

Agencies | Cape Town

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

Meghan Markle confessed that her son Archie's bedroom caught fire when she and her husband Prince Harry were on tour in South Africa. The Duchess of Sussex was joined by tennis player Serena Williams on the Archetypes podcast's debut edition.

During one of their conversations, they brought up the need to maintain a composed demeanour in public while dealing with personal difficulties. As part of her royal duties, Markle and Harry visited the South African slum of Nyanga in 2019. Markle then related this incident. Soon after arriving, they left four-month-old Archie with staff so they could attend a formal meeting. 

“What?” a surprised Williams responded. “[They said] ‘There's been a fire in the baby's room,’” Markle continued, before adding: “I can't believe I'm even talking about this. “We'd just landed an hour, two hours before. We raced back, and our amazing nanny Lauren, who we'd had all the way from Canada to here, was in floods of tears.”

Markle went on to explain that their nanny was preparing to put Archie in bed for his nap when she decided to bring him with her to get a snack at the last minute. "In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire,” she said. “There was no smoke detector, someone happened to smell smoke down the hallway, went in, fire [was] extinguished. He was supposed to be sleeping in there.

“We came back, and of course, as a mother... everyone's in tears, everyone's shaken. And what did we have to do? Go out and give another official engagement.” The podcast, which launched on Tuesday aims to explore the labels and tropes that try to hold women back.