Kathleen's Christmas 1951 was, in her own words, ‘one of the best I remember’ because she was at home, surrounded by her sister and her closest friends. She continued to be indomitably optimistic about her cancer throughout 1952, even describing the result of an X-ray in February as ‘perfect’ despite the fact that more treatment was required and she was immediately compelled to cancel all her singing engagements forthwith, including a trip to France, Switzerland and Germany. Her voice was silent, in public at least, until the end of March but, rather than feel sorry for herself, she diverted the sympathy she received from her friends to the Royal family when King George VI died in February. On the other hand, she became very depressed when she heard that her cellist friend Kathleen Moorhouse had died from breast cancer, having had the same mastectomy operation Ferrier herself had had a year before. Typically she revived her spirits by promptly taking up gardening and put in bedding plants, despite the minuscule patch of earth behind No.2 Frognal Mansions which passed for a garden. Sure enough, later in the summer, she had reason to boast to John Newmark of her achievements in horticulture.

January and the first half of February had been taken up with engagements around Britain, ending with the first London performance of Benjamin Britten's Canticle Abraham and Isaac at the Victoria and Albert Museum on 3rd February after its premiere a fortnight earlier on 21st January in the Albert Hall, Nottingham. The work was recorded at Maida Vale the next day, but its broadcast on 6th February had to be postponed because the King had died in his sleep during the previous night.

In her diaries Kathleen usually placed a tick against an engagement's venue implying that she had received her fee. When she sang Brahms, Gluck (‘Che faro’ – what else?) and Bach with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Adrian Boult at the Festival Hall on 25th March, it was after her absence of five weeks, and the tick against this entry has a defiant ring of ‘I’m back!’