Trevor Albury (above) was a loving little boy who would run into his father's arms as he came home from work every night.

But five-year-old Trevor would pay a terrible price for each tender hug. His dad Albert used to shake the dust off his overalls as he stepped through the door before handing them over to his wife to be washed.

Now Trevor, 63, sits in a chair looking out on his beautiful garden with an oxygen tube connected to his nose. He has been given a year at most to live.

Trevor was bewildered when doctors told him in January he had mesothelioma, an asbestos-related cancer. He had never worked with the deadly substance but that didn't matter. His dad had brought the fibres home.

Two thirds of cases involving women are unexplained but often it is through washing the clothes of asbestos workers. Rates in women have shot up three-fold in the past 25 years.

Trevor has worked for himself since the 70s as a driving instructor and, as far as he knew, had never been near the dust. But then his childhood memories were jogged by his sister Joyce.

He says: "She said, 'Don't you remember our dad coming home from the Cape asbestos factory in Barking and shaking his overalls before giving them to my mum to wash?'.

"I can't really remember. I was only five but it's the only thing we can think of where I could have got it. It's been lying in my lung all that time." Trevor had no health problems until last September when he started having chronic pain in his shoulder. "It just suddenly came on.

I thought it had come from a lad who'd done a sudden emergency stop." He tried painkillers and even acupuncture to try to get rid of it but the pain got worse.

Then he saw his local doctor who said he looked terrible and they needed to do something about it. He had an X-ray and they discovered the whole of his left lung was full of asbestos fibres. Trevor's wife, Jean,61, says: "His left lung was just a white area. It was a solid mass. It was coming out of his lung and had gone into his shoulder.

"They said it was in his nervous system. Of course the first question you ask is: 'How long?' They said a year at the most, if not months. "We were shocked. We had never heard of it. They kept coming back to us asking: have you ever worked with asbestos? But we couldn't think of anything."

Trevor had worked as a milkman, window cleaner, in a printing works and mending typewriters before set up his driving school. "If my sister hadn't remembered, I wouldn't have known.

"Apparently the other lung has been compensating so I noticed nothing." The Cape factory is notorious. It closed in 1968 but the surrounding area has some of the country's highest mesothelioma rates, especially among women who washed their husband's overalls.

Neither his father nor mother, Grace, died of asbestos-related diseases and his brother and sisters are free. "It was just bad luck it was me. I was dealt the wrong cards," says Trevor. Trevor and Jean, of Thurlby, near Stamford, Lincs, are backing the Mirror's Asbestos timebomb campaign and want people to hear their story.

Jean says: "We want people to be aware of it. What the Mirror is doing with their campaign is a big step forward. We want people to be aware of the disease so they know what it's like. It would have a lot more attention if there was someone in the public eye with it. It's evil stuff."