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

ISBN: 0349122180

Author: Foley, Winifred

Condition: New

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, 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 Londons grey terraces.