“It felt as if we were running from something we couldn’t even see, but knew was coming straight for us.”
For Irish holidaymaker James Halford, that is the memory that still hangs over a family break in southwest France that unravelled into fear, smoke and hurried escapes as wildfires tore through the region last week.
James, his wife Clarissa, their children Ryan, 12, and Lara, 10, and James’s 76-year-old mother-in-law, Mieko, had travelled for their first sun holiday in seven years. They were staying at a campsite near Biscarrosse when, on Friday, the order came to leave without delay.
“We were literally just sitting down for dinner when this shrill alarm went off,” said James, who works as a video editor at RTÉ.
Within moments, a long-planned family getaway had become a disorientating journey through evacuation centres, road closures and repeated warnings to move again as the fires shifted closer.
‘I felt like we were being hemmed in’
On that first night, after driving past roads edged by great banks of wildfire smoke, the family found refuge in the town of Mios, sleeping on judo mats in a sports hall that had been turned into an evacuation centre.
Smoke over the road while the Halford family were evacuating from their campsite
By the next day, a moment of kindness arrived: a local English-speaking teacher offered them a room in her home.
But safety, they soon discovered, was only temporary.
“We were about to go to bed in the teacher’s house when everyone’s phones started beeping again: Alert! Get out, get out, get out!” James recalled. “So now we had to drive through the night again.”
That was when, he admits, panic began to creep in.
“I felt like we were being hemmed in.
“I was looking at Google Maps, thinking ‘We can’t get out of here now. We’ve got the Bordeaux fires to the north, the Biscarrosse fires to the south. We were kind of trapped between them.”
Smoke over the campsite in Biscarrosse
The glow of the wildfire at night
‘It has restored my faith in humanity’
In time, the family managed to reach another evacuation centre, where a second local woman and her husband stepped forward and offered them somewhere to stay.
“The local community really rallied around,” James said.
“What this whole thing has really shown me is how kind people are. Everywhere we went, the local people were out in force and were volunteering, helping and inviting people back to their homes.
“It has restored my faith in humanity.”
Through the uncertainty, he said Ryan and Lara coped remarkably well — “great, not easily spooked” — though the repeated phone alerts kept everyone tense for days.
James and his family are now safely home in Ireland, having made their way to Toulouse earlier this week to catch a flight back.
Their return brought enormous relief after days spent on camp beds, navigating blocked roads and trying to keep clear of the advancing, destructive fires.
“It was certainly not the holiday we planned for.”
Read more: Two arrests as firefighters battle blazes near Bordeaux
