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
