Meghan, Duchess of Sussex has revealed that her and Prince Harry's son Archie's bedroom caught on fire during their tour of South Africa in 2019.
The 41-year-old revealed to Serena Williams on the debut episode of her Archetypes podcast on Tuesday that a fire broke out in the nursery where Archie, then aged four-and-a-half months, had been due to go down for a nap while his parents were attending an official engagement.
"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?'" she recalled.
Meghan and Harry raced back to their residence and discovered Archie wasn't in the room at the time of the fire because their nanny had taken him downstairs with her to get a snack.
"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," Meghan said. "He was supposed to be sleeping in there."
Despite being "in tears" and "shaken" by the incident, Meghan and Harry had to leave Archie to go to another engagement, even though she suggested telling people what happened instead.
"I think, optically, the focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels," she shared. "Because we did - we had to leave our baby. And even though we were being moved to another place afterwards, we still had to leave him and go do another official engagement."
Meghan and Harry, who are also parents to 14-month-old daughter Lilibet, stepped back from their roles as senior members of the royal family in 2020.
