Archie was only around four
months old at the time, and as told in Meghan’s first Archetypes podcast
episode last week, the baby’s nanny Lauren was “in a flood of tears”
following the terrifying incident which happened whilst the royal couple were
undergoing a royal engagement.
A week later, a witness at the
ambassador’s residence confirmed the Duchess’ version of events to the South
African Newspaper The Citizen,
revealing that while they didn’t see a fire, there was smoke and they saw the
heater after it was removed from the room, severely melted.
Speaking to a good friend and
tennis ace Serena Williams about the ordeal on her debut episode,
which went straight to number one in many countries worldwide, Meghan revealed:
“We dropped him off at this housing unit that we were staying at and he
was getting ready to go down for his nap.”
The couple then headed off for
their first engagement of the tour and following her speech, the couple got
into their car and were told the news: “There’s been a fire at the
residence. There’s been a fire in the baby’s room.”
She continued: “Our
amazing nanny Lauren…was in floods of tears. She was supposed to put Archie
down for his nap and she just said, you know what, let me go and get a snack
from downstairs.”
Lauren took Archie with her,
meaning he luckily was not in the room when the fire started. “In that
amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on
fire. There was no smoke detector, someone just happened to smell smoke down
the hallway so they went in and the fire was extinguished. He was meant to be
sleeping in there.
“Everyone’s in tears,
everyone’s shaken. And what did we have to do? Go out and do another official
engagement. And I said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense, can you just tell people
what happened?”
Serena added: “I couldn’t
have done that.” The royals ultimately moved to different accommodations,
but Meghan was understandably shaken following the ordeal. Meghan’s second
Archetypes episode is out on Tuesday and features Mariah Carey.
