Monica Tobias Gay, writing as Monica Lester, recently published her first book for children: Tomas and the road to home. It was first written in 1997 when she and her late husband, Harvey Tobias were living in rural France, during the emotional hours after Harvey was diagnosed with mesothelioma.
“Harvey was an accountant and had never knowingly been around asbestos. He used to work in the east end of London where a lot of demolition from bomb sites and prefabs took place. Through an organisation in France called CRAC – Contre Recherche des Cancer – we found two great doctors who managed to help keep Harvey alive for five years. At the time, the department had a very large number of cases of the terrible disease.
“The team inserted a medical device into Harvey’s chest to take the chemotherapy. He had 18 months of remission, during which time we bought a ruined village for a song and started to reconstruct the main house. It gave Harvey something to hang on for. But in the end, Harvey sadly died four months before completion – at just 58 years old.
“He’d helped me enormously to correct the punctuation in my manuscript and get it into shape. But after he died, I had so much to cope with – the story got put into a box file and that was that. The characters in the book, Marion and Harry, are based on us – Monica and Harvey – and the dogs, their names and personalities are also real.
“Tomas arrived at our house in the middle of a storm. We already had two rescue dogs – Luke and Sam – and they welcomed the tiny little dog with the bad leg into our lives. He had been thrown out of somewhere and although he had a name inked onto his collar, the phone number had been crossed out. The book explores where I imagined he came from and what happened after.
“Now, after long last and coming across the manuscript again, Tomas and the road to home is a book and in memory of the fine man that Harvey was. If the book can be used to help other sufferers, it would be wonderful. The proceeds from any sales will go to Mesothelioma UK.”
You can email Monica at mo*************@***il.com if you would like to purchase a copy of her book for £8.95 & £3.00 P&P.
