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

(Paperback)

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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.

Author Bio

Born in 1914, Winifred Foley grew up in the Forest of Dean. Now in her nineties, she lives in Cheltenham.