The singer leads an increasingly reclusive life behind her new home's turn-of-the-century walls and, as the disease tightens its grip, friends say it is unlikely she will be well enough even to enjoy personally the two greatest accolades of her career - her investiture at Buckingham Palace on March 2 and her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at New York's Waldorf Astoria a fortnight later.

She has told them that she is keen to meet the Queen and be presented with the OBE she was awarded in the New Years Honours List and is equally eager to join the traditional jam session by Hall of Fame Inductees, who this year include Sir Paul MaCartney and Bruce Springsteen. But even though 10 Downing Street has made her investiture a top priority - "We'll do it sooner rather than later" said a source - it seems she will be confined to her house, coping with a cancer declared untreatable by doctors on both sides of the Atlantic.

The perilious state of her health has forced a woman always noted for her privacy to seek even further seclusion. She left the cosy converted granary in Oxfordshire that she had made her home in 1994 after the initial diagnosis, to move into this sprawling family house shortly before Christmas. Here she is shielded from the outside world by dense evergreen holly and a tall electric fence. The anonymous double gates at the foot of the drive are padlocked from the inside and a rustic wooden gate barring the muddy track leading to the back door is bolted shut. Her friend said bluntly: "The truth is that Dusty wants to die in a room with a view - it's that simple."

And her new home does indeed have a view. From her elegant, tall-windowed lounge and master bedroom she can see not just the sloping gardens with their towering fir trees and hedges dotted with the nests of songbirds, but a wooded valley where deer roam.

Last May, shortly after breast cancer had claimed the life of Linda McCartney, Dusty sold the rights to her 275 songs to Prudential Insurance for 6.25 million pounds after protracted negotiations. The delighted company announced that the deal was a one-off and said: "Dusty just felt the time was right." It smacked of putting her affairs in order because, sadly, the singer already has first hand knowledge of the fate which awaits her. For her mother Kay, from whom she inherited her musical talent was killed by lung cancer.

Describing their final meeting, Dusty said: "She looked like one of those horror masks, all sunken. Her eyes were glassy from the drugs, but suddenly she reached up this claw and tweaked my nose. I don't remember her ever doing that to me before. And then, suddenly she passed out again. The next day I had to return to the States but I called and said 'How is Mrs O'Brien?' And they said, 'Oh, she passed away.' It was such a shock because it was so matter-of-fact. So the tweak was important. And it was horrific too. I did come unglued then. I handled it very badly. Partly guilt. I wasn't there . . ."

But when she confronted her own cancer there was no such emotional weakness, just a pragmatic and philosphical response to the female doctor who told her: "I'm afraid it's a tumour and it's one we just don't want." Dusty had discovered the lump in 1994 after a diet - part of a lifelong battle with her weight - revealed a vast indentation in her breast. She was referred within 48 hours to London's premier cancer clinic, the Royal Marsden, and given the shattering news.

She said "The shock was enormous, but I was blessed that it all happened so fast. In the space of three days I knew what I had to deal with. I was enraged - that this was happening to Miss Springfield and it was highly inconvenient because she had this new album to promote, for God's sake. I shed about three tears in the hallway and then said, 'Let's have lunch'. My brother came, the neighbours who brought me to town, my secretary, my accountant. I had a really good time, I don't know why. That's the spirit of my family, as if to say, 'Oh, to Hell with it'. It was only when I came home one night and saw my cat lying asleep that I thought, 'Who's going to look after you?' It was as if somebody had run a train through me. I wept and wept and wept because then I realised: it is you. It's you. Yes, it might kill you."

Despite surgery to remove the lump and six months of gruelling chemotherapy, which finished shortly before Cristmas 1994, followed by radiotherapy, Dusty maintained an attitude she describes as "positive denial".

"Most of the time I felt really good. They make you part of the cure, not part of the problem. I always knew that once they give you the all clear that's the hard part, because you've been so much help and the only demands are to find some courage, keep faith and show up. Then its about returning to life and its demands. And the demands of the music business are extraordinary at the best of times. I do believe there's a mindset in dealing with it which helps. My family was from Ireland, and I believe the Irish fighter is better than the person who feels victimised. Why me? Why not?" Brave words from a brave woman, one who believed she could keep the cancer in remission through sheer force of willpower.

But then it was willpower alone which transformed Mary Isobel Catherine O'Brien, daughter of a tax accountant and a housewife, from a dumpy, plain bespectacled convent schoolgirl into Dusty Springfield, Diva. Her personal and musical epiphany came in the bedroom of her North London home when she was 16. "Be miserable, or become someone else" she told her reflection in a mirror.

Obsessed with the glamour of the Hollywood blondes of the fifties - this was 1955 - she ripped off her National Health glasses, gymslip and sensible lace-ups. In their place she put a sophisticated pleated frock, high heels, lashings of black eye make-up and a stiff blonde beehive wig. The image which looked back at her, the one she is still known today, secured her a successful audition with the all-girl trio The Lana Sisters whose advertisment Dusty had spotted in The Stage.

From there she joined her brother Tom and his friend Tim Feild to form The Springfields, the band which was to ignite her solo career, launched in 1963. Her biographer Lucy O'Brien puts it succintly in her book Dusty, which will be published [reissued] to mark the singer's 60th birthday in April: "As youth mod culture came to a head in the Sixties - with its stringent attention to fashion, Motown and television pop programs - Dusty Springfield, panda-eyed and urbane, emerged as Queen Bee."

She was to ensure her place in the history of modern music with a treasure trove of classics - "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself," "I Only Want To Be With You," "I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten," "Son-Of-A Preacher Man" - but the heights of her personal success were to be matched by personal lows.

She professed herself "bored with Britain" in 1972 and moved to Los Angeles, where she embarked on drink and drug binges, suffered depression and finally admitted she was bisexual. Although many might consider sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll behaviour appropriate for such a star, it did Dusty no favours and she floundered musically for more than a decade. Then came the renaissance. In 1987 The Pet Shop Boys asked her to sing on their worldwide hit "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" and as they paid homage to her they instructed a new generation of fans in her unique talents.

She collaborated further with them, singing the theme tune to the film Scandal, "Nothing Has Been Proved," and then in 1994 Quentin Tarantino included "Son-Of-A Preacher Man on the cult soundtrack to his cinematic masterpiece Pulp Fiction. Dusty was back. But even as she savoured her renewed success, the cancer in her breast was growing, and in the summer of 1996, a year-and-a-half after she hoped she had beaten it, she learnt that the lump had returned.

For a further 18 months she fought it with chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but by February last year she was so sick that she could not attend the music industry Oscars, the Brit Awards, at which she was to be a guest of honour. It was a key indicator to her failing strength.

Friends say she is now savouring her days at home. "I'm happy being on my own," she admits. "Genuinely, I don't want a close relationship. But there is a free-floating loneliness, not attached to a person or a place. I'm smart enough to know I can't put it right by making a geographic move, because I've done that and it didn't work. It's an inside job."

And that, of course, must be the ultimate challenge before she dies, to marry who she was with what she became so that she can finally be at peace with the world.

Sarah Oliver,
Mail on Sunday,
January 24, 1999