I think, when we see each other again, I’m just going to sit and listen to you tell me about everything. For days, and days. I could listen to you speak for ever, and it will take a long, long time for you to give me all the news, the things you’ve seen, the things you’ve done. Meanwhile, I’ll try to describe London so you have some idea what it’s like these days. When I first left in 1941, the Blitz was still on, and when I came back a year later the city was all smashed up, all the wounds still very raw. Rubble everywhere, dangling wires. Now all that has been tidied away. The biggest bomb sites in the middle of town are hidden behind hoardings with adverts pasted all over them. You look up from a gigantic image of the Bisto Kids to see half a building, or the side where a neighbouring building collapsed. Sometimes you’ll see a house with no front wall but with the floors still intact and stairs zig-zagging up to nowhere. The streets are full of the injured: soldiers with one leg or one arm, men in wheelchairs, women on crutches. I passed a shop window the other day on Wigmore Street: a medical supply shop with a display of prosthetic limbs. One of the legs had been cut away to show the inner mechanism and it looked just like one of those eviscerated houses: springs zig-zagging like a ghost staircase. So that’s London: empty sleeves pinned across chests, ersatz coffee, ghosts of buildings. And life going on regardless.

To pass the time – no, so much more than that! – I’ve been taking Greek lessons. Can you believe it? Dimitriou found me a teacher here in London. She’s called Mrs Karavangeli and she’s the wife of one of the deacons at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral (we have a Greek cathedral, you know: just to confuse matters, it’s on Moscow Road). I sit in her kitchen in Bayswater and she talks to me in Greek, and then we read her children’s picture books and Greek newspapers, very old ones from her attic. She says I’m coming along but she’s a very kind (plump, grey-haired, so don’t get any ideas) lady and even if I studied for the next ten years my Greek would never be half as good as your English. But we can have lively discussions about Athenian construction scandals from 1932 when next we meet.

I’m not sure where my new job will take me. It’s quite possible I’ll just end up in Scotland or Cornwall, painting ships or munitions workers. But I’ve told the WAAC that I want to work where the fighting is, so with a bit of luck I’ll be on my way again. If so, and only then, I’ll get out the atlas and the string …