Sue Heringman chose to write a book about her late mother Jean Heringman Willacy's extraordinary life after discovering recordings and diaries documenting her travels and friendships with refugees. Joanna Davis reports.

WHEN Sue Heringman’s mother passed away, she had no idea that remaining was a legacy of thousands of pages and photos of personal history.

Sue, 69, of Minterne, near Dorchester, spent years transcribing the notes and tape recordings of her mum Jean’s time in Afghanistan and later life in Pakistan.

American-born Jean, who died in 2004, was so passionate about Afghanistan and its people, she spent years living there and went on to dedicate her life to working with and raising awareness about refugees.

The travails of this extraordinary woman have now been documented in Sue’s book - The Keeper of Families - Jean Heringman Willacy's Afghan Diaries. It also includes a number of photos taken by Jean of the Afghan people she met.

American housewife Jean fulfilled her long-held ambition to travel once she got divorced, Sue said.

“She divorced my father and decided to go and travel and fulfil this ambition of hers to travel and do photography. She travelled through the Himalayas and worked as a freelance photographer.

“She had a job with the Afghan tourist board, went to Kabul and fell in love with it.”

By 1967, enterprising Jean became a businesswoman and began importing licorice root and traditional fur -trimmed embroidered coats popular with hippies in the UK and USA and supplying English language books to Afghan readers.

“When she was there she met Henry Willacy through the fur trade and they got together. When they came back they were in London but decided it was too expensive and ended up going to Dorset,” Sue said.

The Keeper of Families is divided into two parts with the first part following Jean's time in Afghanistan pre-Soviet Union invasion.

"It was called the Paris of south east Asia," Sue said. "It's hard to believe but girls were going around in mini skirts."

The second half of the book focuses upon Jean as first-hand witness of the coup. Eventually Jean had to leave her beloved Afghanistan, Sue said.

"She went to Pakistan and got involved with the Afghan refugees there. She was living in the camps and would smuggle papers out in her bra."

As Jean aged she never lost her desire to help others Sue said, and continued to help refugees when she was in her 50s. Jean's friend, the historian Nancy Hatch Dupree, who was known as the 'grandmother of Afghanistan said to Sue 'I've never met anybody like your mum,"

Sue is a retired Spanish-English teacher and first developed her love of Spanish through speaking to Mexican immigrants in the US who Jean was trying to help.

After Jean passed away at home in Dorset Sue and her family were shocked to discover all of her mother's travel memorabilia. She spent hours meticulously preserving Jean's photos, listening to cassette recordings and transcribing pages from her diaries.

"I couldn't bring myself to throw any of it away," Sue said. "It was such an important part of her life. I never knew there was all this wonderful material waiting to be discovered. I thought it could make a book right from the beginning. I decided I had to transcribe all the material to pay tribute to her and all the Afghan refugees.

Sue said around nine years of going through her mum's material writing the book revealed some things she didn't know about her.

"We had no idea she knew any of the Mujahideen (Afghan guerilla militants fighting to defend their country from the Soviet Union invasion in 1979)," Sue said. "We had no idea she was giving them photography lessons.

"My mum's greatest regret was not being able to go back to Afghanistan because of the conflict there. That was like physical pain for her."

And despite the events in the book happening a long time ago there's still plenty of relevance to Jean's story today, Sue said.

"The plight of refugees is everywhere," Jean said. "Like the situation in Syria at the moment. All of this gave me more urgency to get the book out. Just the fact that someone cared was key to the relationship my mum had with the Afghan people. She wasn't just a do-gooder. It came from within her to do this."

Sue, former director of the English language school at the University of Southern California in Madrid, said she's been told by people who knew Jean that the book 'captures' her mum as she was.

"The people who knew her said it emphasised her spirit, that was for me the best thing ever - it felt like she was sitting on my shoulder."

*The Keeper of Families - Jean Heringman Willacy's Afghan Diaries is available from Amazon or from Sue's website jeansafgandiaries.com