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.
