num_pages: 256
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 miners 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 Foleyour Pollhad 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 Londons grey terraces.
language: English
title: Full Hearts and Empty Bellies: A 1920s Childhood from the Forest of Dean to the Streets of London
publisher: Little, Brown Book Group