Meghan Markle has spoken about how a Zimbabwean nanny saved her son Archie from a fire that broke out in the nursery where he was staying in 2019.
In the first episode of her long-awaited Spotify podcast, Archetypes, Meghan Markle said Archie narrowly escaped a fire in his bedroom, where he was supposed to be sleeping, during the Sussexes’ tour of South Africa in 2019.
Meghan said that a heater in Archie’s nursery caught fire while his then nanny, named only Lauren – a Zimbabwean, had taken the four-and-a-half-month-old with her downstairs to get a snack. She said:
She was supposed to put Archie down for his nap, and she just said, ‘You know what? Let me just go get a snack downstairs.’ And she was from Zimbabwe, and we loved that she would always tie him on her back with a mud cloth, and her instinct was like, ‘Let me just bring him with me before I put him down.’ 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. He was supposed to be sleeping in there.
The former Suits star told how they had dropped Archie at the housing unit they were staying in for a sleep straight after arriving on their official tour.
Meanwhile, despite what had happened, Meghan and her husband the Duke of Sussex left to carry out a visit to the Nyanga township, in Cape Town, where the duchess delivered a speech.