Full Hearts and Empty Bellies: A 1920s Childhood from the Forest of Dean to the Streets of London

Few people visited the Forest of Dean. They thought us primitive, and looked down on us.  Winifred Foley grew up in the 1920s, a bright, determined miner’s daughter in a world of unspoiled beauty and desperate hardship, in which women were widowed at 30 and children died of starvation. Living hand-to-mouth in a tumbledown cottage in the Forest of Dean, Foley—"our Poll"—had a loving family and the woods and streams of a forest "better than heaven" as a playground. But a brother and sister were dead in infancy, bread had to be begged from kindly neighbors, and she never had a new pair of shoes or a shop-bought doll. And most terrible of all, like her sister before her, at 14 little Poll had to leave her beloved forest for the city, bound for a life in service among London’s grey terraces.