Meghan Markle Reveals Archie’s Nursery Caught Fire During Southern Africa Tour

Nearly two years ago, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry announced a deal with Spotify to make podcast content with their studio, Archewell Audio. On Tuesday, the first episode of Meghan’s podcast Archetypes was released through the streaming app, and it features Serena Williams as an interview guest. In the episode, the pair discusses their close friendship, cracks a few jokes, and addresses the more serious sides of raising children in the public eye.

In a bit of huge news, Meghan revealed that the South Africa trip where she and Harry first told journalist Tom Bradby that they were struggling with their royal roles was even more stressful from the inside. Meghan said that they left their son Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, then four-and-a-half months old, with his nanny at the location where they would be staying and went to the pair’s first engagement of the trip at Nyanga Township. When the engagement was done, they received word that a fire had broken out at the dormitory. 

“The heater in the nursery caught on fire,” she said. “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 explained that Archie’s nanny, Lauren, was holding him in a different room and he was safe, but she still felt shaken up. “We came back,” she continued. “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.” According to Meghan, she and Harry went to the next engagement, leaving Archie behind. “The focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels.”

In a tweet, Buzzfeed News’s Ellie Hall pointed out that the couple did have two engagements during their first day in South African.

Meghan told the story after Williams provided one harrowing behind-the-scenes tale of her own. The tennis star mentioned that her daughter Olympia had fallen out of her high chair and broken her wrist during the French Open in 2018 where Williams was chastised for wearing a catsuit. She apparently won the match the next day with only 30 minutes of sleep.

“She was on my watch, and I was just basically devastated,” Williams said. “Like, I literally couldn’t think. I felt so guilty. I just, anyway. So she fell. We went to the hospital and she had a small tear, a break in her wrist, so she had to get a cast and we didn’t get back ‘til like four in the morning. Meanwhile, of course, it is the one day I was playing early. I remember holding her the whole night and just like rocking her to sleep and I just didn’t let her out of my sight at that point because I was already and I’m hard on myself, and I’m a little bit of a perfectionist.” 

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