Real life
Patsy had always hoped to meet her lifelong pen pal
Ever since Steph Calam can remember, her mother Patsy would receive a special blue envelope in the post every few months. ‘It was exciting whenever I spotted one come through the letter box and plop onto the mat,’ says the 58-year-old from Hoghton, Lancashire. ‘I was around six years old when I began to understand who all those letters were from, and it only made me more curious.’
Then, Patsy, now 80, told her daughter all about the friend she had more than 3,000 miles away in New York. ‘Mum explained she had a pen pal called Carol Ann, and that they had been writing letters to each other since they were 12 years old!’ Steph remembers. ‘They’d both been Girl Guides and it was part of the programme. Mum had a couple more pen pals too, but communication had eventually fizzled out.’
That wasn’t the case with Patsy and Carol Ann, though, as the pair – only a month apart in age – bonded, sharing stories and news about their lives over the years – from their teens, to adulthood, meeting their future husbands and having children. ‘Carol Ann had three kids, just like Mum, and a couple of times a year, she’d send family photos,’ Steph recalls. ‘I used to be so intrigued seeing pictures of her three children, all similar in age to me and my brothers, Duncan and Nick, and wondered what their lives were like all the way in the US.’
At 18, Steph went to the University of Sheffield before coming back home to Hoghton, buying a house and joining the police. ‘Even after I left home, Mum would eagerly tell me whenever she got another letter from Carol Ann, filling me in on her news,’ Steph says. ‘But as the world opened up, there was one thing she said that stuck with me – that one of her biggest regrets was never meeting Carol Ann.’ Steph later encouraged her mum to make the trip, offering to join her if she ever decided to go, but the plan never materialised and the years passed. It wasn’t until the beginning of 2023 that Patsy’s lifelong dream to meet one of her oldest friends started to become a reality. ‘Mum’s 80th was approaching in June, and my brothers and I were chatting about a gift,’ Steph explains. ‘Mum is lucky to have everything she needs, so we wanted to get her something memorable. I realised it was the perfect opportunity to fulfil one of her greatest wishes.’
It didn’t take much for Steph to convince her brothers, Duncan, now 56, and Nick, 52, and the trio got planning, with the first task to contact Carol Ann. ‘Tracking down Carol Ann was a task in itself!’ Steph laughs. ‘The next time I visited Mu
