Book description
'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 unspoilt beauty and
desperate hardship, in which women were widowed at thirty 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 neighbours 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 fourteen
little Poll had to leave her beloved forest for the city, bound for a
life in service among London's grey terraces. Born in 1914, Winifred
Foley grew up in the Forest of Dean. She died in March 2009.
