Chapter 23Brenda
Helmdale Lodge Psychiatric Nursing Home stood in its own extensive grounds, on the outskirts of the seaside resort of Rhyl in the county of Denbighshire in North Wales, some forty three miles from Liverpool. A private facility, the Lodge was a small and self-contained unit, with views over the Irish Sea, that catered for no more than thirty patients at any given time, most of them on a long-term basis.
A hundred years ago, Helmdale would perhaps have been described as a private mental asylum, but modern day enlightenment had removed such stigma from the treatment of mental illness and there was nothing of the Speke Hill style Victorian Gothic about its appearance, or in the way its inmates were treated; private rooms with television, comfortable beds and furnishings repl
