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.