A Devon weekly that focused on a cancer sufferer’s poor treatment from a holiday firm moved local businessmen to provide a free holiday for her and her family.

Annetta Lightburn booked a holiday after being told she had beaten the illness, but it returned and she was given only months to live.

The holiday firm would not refund her £440 deposit on a week’s break to Malaga, claiming she should have notified them about an existing condition. It would have been the family’s first holiday abroad.

North Devon Journal writer Andrea Foster got the tear-jerking story and the publicity led to two local holiday companies offering Annetta and her three children free holidays.

Annetta had been given a clean bill of health at every check-up between January and August last year and believed she had finally beaten the cancer but it flared up again, attacking her lungs and bones and in January she was given a couple of months to live.

It was another course of chemotherapy that forced her to cancel the holiday, and the holiday firm said her insurance did not cover cancer. She wanted a refund on the deposit so she could take the children on a shorter break in the time she had left.

She said: “I wanted the children to remember me and that holiday before I’m gone out of their little lives for ever.”

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