The Duchess of Sussex has not been reticent about sharing the reasons for her and Prince Harry’s decision to step back from the royal family, but her new podcast suggests there may have been another moment that made her question the demands of the role.
In Meghan’s Archetypes podcast, released on Tuesday, she recounts that during the Sussexes’ tour of South Africa the couple’s son Archie narrowly escaped a fire in his bedroom. Despite being shaken and in tears, the couple had to then go out to another official engagement, she said.
Meghan said the couple had dropped Archie off at the residence where they were staying before going to an engagement, and his then nanny had taken the four-and-a-half-month-old with her downstairs to get a snack before putting him down for a nap. While she was downstairs the heater in his nursery caught fire, in a room with no smoke detector.
Meghan recalled being told the news on visit to the Nyanga township, just after giving a speech.
“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,” she said. “We came back. And, of course, as a mother, you go, ‘Oh, my God, what?’”
Speaking to the tennis champion Serena Williams, she recalled: “Everyone’s in tears. Everyone shaken. And what did we have to do? Go out and do another official engagement. I said this doesn’t make any sense.”
Meghan said she asked if they couldn’t just explain what had happened, adding: “We had to leave our baby … we still had to leave him and go into another official engagement.”
Talking about the inner turmoil that public figures can experience behind the scenes, she added: “And so much, I think, optically, the focus ends up being on how it looks instead of how it feels.”
