Penny was beginning to gather the skills that have now begun to revolutionise the care of dementia patients and to transform the last years of their lives from a fear-filled existence into ones filled with contentment.

With her son-in-law, psychologist and author Oliver James, she has helped write an indispensable handbook for anyone coping with the effects of dementia and who wants to keep a sufferer as happy as is humanly possible.

In place of the sad blankness, sometimes punctuated by irrational rage, Penny and her fellow workers at the dementia charity she founded – SPECAL, or Specialised Early Care for Alzheimer’s – draws on what sufferers still know about the things they were once good at.

Using SPECAL’s simple-to-follow method – which includes never questioning a sufferer and never contradicting them – anyone can give a dementia patient a profound sense of wellbeing, along with a blissful lack of awareness of all the things they can no longer do.

She says this halts the emotional shutdown which, up until now, has often been interpreted as a wipe-out of the personality.

She compares a dementia sufferer’s difficulties with someone sticking pictures into a photograph album – a natural process a healthy brain is doing every waking moment.

Dementia robs the sufferer of the ability to take new photos and put them into their album – but the old pictures are still there and can be used to make them feel at ease.

“My mother taught me that no one loses their personality with dementia. They may slam the album shut when surrounded by the kind of common sense that makes them aware of how badly their brain is letting them down but they are still left clutching it,” says Penny.

“The idea that it was possible to persuade them to open it again began when I realised I could protect my mother from the knowledge that her mind could no longer store facts about the here and now.

“I had to take her back to those parts of her mind and experience where her memories and skills were still intact.”

Penny noticed that Dorothy never tired of things she enjoyed, such as preparing for a holiday. Penny’s father couldn’t see the point of packing a suitcase for a flight no one would be taking.

But when he contradicted Dorothy’s conviction that she was perpetually on her way to an airport or a railway station, she became aware that there was something wrong with her mind and descended into a spiral of fright, distress and anger.

Penny realised that if her mother wasn’t contradicted – “Yes, this is the airport lounge and let’s wait here until our flight number is called” – packing and unpacking could be repeated again and again, and she would never tire of it. Her mother became perfectly happy.

Eventually Penny persuaded her father to allow Dorothy to keep a suitcase so she could endlessly pack and unpack. When her mother began to need round-the-clock care, she found a nursing home where staff allowed residents to believe whatever made them happy.  

Her mother died in 1980, at peace with herself. She had even been able to communicate to Penny, while in the most advanced stages of her dementia, that she was feeling poorly.

“She could do this because I kept open the lines of communication with her. She let me know something was wrong by refusing to respond,” says Penny. “Staff found she had a temperature and throat infection.

“After she died, when I was trying to explain what I had discovered, I was often asked ‘When did your mother stop knowing you?’

“My reply has always been that she never stopped knowing me because I never stopped knowing her. I had the good fortune to find a way of reaching those parts of her memory that were still intact.

Because she was still able to communicate with me in her own way – even if that was by not communicating at all – I knew she was still there and essentially the same person I had always known.

“I hope SPECAL will give dementia sufferers a much happier end to their lives than they would otherwise have had – but I also hope it will return some part of them to the people who loved them and still love them.”

* To order Contented Dementia (Ebury Press, £17.99) with free UK delivery, call 0871 521 1301 (10p/min from BT landlines) with your card details, or send a cheque payable to Express Newspapers to: The Express Bookshop, PO Box 200, Falmouth, TR11 4WJ or order via www.expressbookshop.com

*  For information about the SPECAL approach to dementia care, visit www.specal.co.uk