Paddy Hughes has written numerous articles for the national and local press. One particularly interesting feature was for the Daily Express weekend supplement. Paddy travelled with photographer Barry Lewis to record stories about the Comete Line, the extraordinarily brave band of people who rescued shot down Allied airmen in WW2 and led them to freedom through occupied Europe often at the cost of their own lives. The idea was to follow a sponsored run from Brussels to St. Jean de Luz on the Spanish border to commemorate their exploits and raise money for those who still suffer from torture and ill treatment. As the runners wound their way through Belgium and France, more and more of these courageous people turned up to tell their stories and meet airmen they had helped.

NATO air force runners arriving at St. Jean de Luz There was the lady who took us to the walled graveyard where forty five years before as a teenager she had planned to hide a Spitfire pilot thirty yards from a German checkpoint on the border between Vichy and Free France. The idea was that her sister on one side of the border would befriend the guards and that they would exchange a cartload of wood for several nights. Then, on an appointed night, they would take the pilot through to freedom hidden under the logs. As she was explaining this she reached to open the iron gate and there was a rusty squeal from the old hinge. She froze and silent tears poured down her cheeks. Ten minutes later and recomposed, she told us, "Ze noise was exactement la meme. All ze same fear returned. It was terrible!". Nonetheless, they got the airman through and, over the following months, loads of guns for the Resistance, too. But, perhaps, the most extraordinary story of all happened near Freteval. In the local forest 175 shot down allied airmen had been secretly gathered and kept over months by the Comete stalwarts right under the noses of the Germans. In June 1944 it was too difficult to travel due to allied bombing and the plan was to await rescue by the SAS. Well….after the runners came in that evening, there was going to be the official unveiling of a sculpted stone to commemorate this secret camp. Baron Jean de Blommaert who created the camp was standing in the main square of the town when a car window was wound down and a British voice asked where a local hotel was. Suddenly, there was instant recognition, " Jean!" "Gordon!!" It was Gordon Hands, shot down tail gunner of a Halifax and first inmate of the Freteval camp who had helped Jean set it up. Gordon was a plasterer who had just lost his job and, with his redundancy money, had come independently to show his wife the place where he had been hidden by Comete. The coincidence that he had chosen that very evening so many years later was astonishing. There wasn’t a dry eye anywhere as Gordon went up with Jean to lay wreaths at the memorial stone!

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