AN: if you speak French you will probably notice that Delia has made a few mistakes in spelling/grammar - they are deliberate as she hasn't studied French since school and doesn't remember everything! I'll include a translation of what she was intending to say at the bottom for those who are interested :)

Dear Patsy,

Your letter was perfect (as always!). It makes me so glad to know all those little details about you; they feel like things a friend should know and it makes me feel nearer to you, as if I might step outside one morning and see you going by with your midwife's bag on your way to the clinic. In fact I feel now as if I am enough of an expert that I could write one of those French vocabulary exercises we were always doing in school on the subject of 'my best friend'. You know the kind of thing? Something like this:

Ma meileur amie s'appelle Patience Elizabeth Mount mais j'appelle ses Pats. Elle est très gentille et jolie, mais elle n'a pas un petit ami parce que garçons ne sont aucon amusement. Elle aime la gymnastique et le haddock (what is the french word for haddock? should it be l'haddock? do they even eat haddock in France? Now I've started I realize I always was dreadful at French!) avec des frites, mais elle me aime mieux parce que je suis sa petite amie impertinente préférée!

I rather hope you aren't much good at French either or you'll notice how many mistakes I made there! (maybe they teach Latin instead in catholic school? Or do they teach both?). If I handed that in as homework to the French mistress I would be sure to get lots of cross corrections and a 'Delia needs to stop daydreaming and work harder on her French lessons' in my school report! Even so, I hope it will make you smile and go some way towards making up for how I embarrassed myself in my last letter. I am sorry I went on as though you having a boyfriend was such a certainty! I suppose I just thought you too lovely to possibly be unattached. Now I think on it though, I can't picture a man special enough to do you justice so it makes sense that you'd be single.
Oh dear, I'm afraid I'm just digging myself in deeper now and I don't know how to make it better! Maybe I should move on from boyfriends altogether? If I go on and pretend I never brought up the subject in the first place I imagine you will be tactful enough to allow my indiscretion to pass without feeling too cross with me.

Actually Pats, there was something I really wanted to share with you, but it's a secret - you mustn't tell mam! Will you promise? It would only disappoint her if nothing comes of it and I can't stand it when she gives me that reproachful look of hers (it's the same one she gave me when I knocked over a jug of milk or tore a new dress as a little girl, and although she might not be as scary as a Catholic School nun it still makes me squirm. Just yesterday I found myself looking down and scuffing my shoe against the floor exactly like a child in disgrace in spite of my age, all because she discovered I had mended a blue shirt with white thread instead of matching it!).

Well, I'll just assume you promised and tell you anyway. You see, the thing is… I think I've started remembering things in my dreams. Mostly it's just little things, like the smell of bleach or a song on a jukebox (the rest of the detail slips away as soon as I open my eyes), but every time I wake up from one of those dreams I feel a little more like I know who Delia Busby is. There's nothing I could point to and say 'that's what happened', but I think one day there might be. I hope so as I would so like to remember you and all the things we did together in London! But I'm afraid that I'm simply wanting it so hard that I'm making things up. It's so difficult to be sure of what is truly memory when I imagine a thousand scenes a day of what my life might have been like. I've been trying to recall the accident and work backwards, but apart from a few indistinct impressions of the hospital I might never have been to London at all. I know these dreams are a small thing to pin hopes on when mostly it's all still such a fog, but it's something isn't it?

While I'm confessing things to you, I might as well admit to all of it. Mam still doesn't want me going anywhere without her, but we are both so cooped up that we are beginning to fray each other's nerves. I think we have lived independently of each other for so long that getting used to a full time mother-child, carer-invalid relationship is not at all easy (especially now that I am physically well and not nearly as mentally feeble as she seems to believe). So I snuck out. It was all rather thrilling actually, it felt just like a scene from Romeo and Juliet (or at least the way Romeo and Juliet would be if there was no Romeo and Juliet was a bored amnesiac looking for a forbidden taste of freedom instead of a tryst with a boy. Not so very like it now I come to think about it... but that's Shakespeare's fault really. I can't help it if he never wrote a play about amnesia!). I told mam I was going for a lie down for an hour before supper then slipped out through the back door while she was busy in the parlour. The end of our garden is only separated from the woods and fields behind it by a low wooden fence and the little stream I told you about before, so it is very easy to get over and circle back round to the street. Oh Pats, the relief of it! Even breathing feels different when there's no one watching to make sure you aren't about to stop.

I didn't go far, only up to the woods to see where the bluebells will grow in summer and then to the village for a bag of peppermint creams, but it felt so good to be free for just a little while that I think I went a touch crazy. I had to pass the railway line to get back home, and I can't tell you how close I was to getting on a train bound for London and coming to surprise you. For a few minutes I felt such a thrill at my own (dubious) cleverness that I forgot all about how frantic mam would have been, or how inconvenient it would be for you if I really did show up on your doorstep with nowhere to stay and nothing to my name but the stubb of a train ticket and a bag of peppermint creams. I even got as far as asking about fares at the ticket office (it seemed such a wonderful idea at the time!) but then the man at the desk asked which station I wanted and I realized that not only was the three and six in my pocket unlikely to be enough to get me all the way to Nonnatus House and back, I also had no idea which station would bring me closest to Poplar. London is so very big and I am really rather small. So of course I came home again and was back in my room like a good little patient by the time mam came upstairs to check on me (I know I know, you needn't tell me - I am a terrible patient. As a nurse you must be horrified by my disobedient antics! For all that though, I can't quite make myself be sorry I did it).

I know I should be grateful to even be alive, but I want to be well NOW Pats. I want to live with friends in London and be a nurse and have beach parties in my bedroom in the middle of winter. I want to eat haddock and chips. I want to teach the cubs everything they have ever wanted to know about blood and then I want to go dancing with you until after curfew, so I have to climb back into the nurses' home through a friend's bedroom window (or better yet live somewhere that has no curfew at all, where we can dance or talk all night if we want to). And I want to believe that one day I'll look back and this part of my life will be nothing more than a brief pause between greater things, because the taste of those peppermint creams is still lingering on my tongue like freedom and staying this way forever doesn't feel like an option.

With love,

Your petulant, impatient, impertinent

Delia

Translation: My best friend is called Patience Elizabeth Mount, but I call her Pats. She is very kind and pretty, but she doesn't have a boyfriend because boys are no fun. she loves gymnastics and haddock with chips, but she likes me better because I am her favourite impertinent little friend!