Full Hearts & Empty Bellies
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 30 and children died of starvation. Living in a tumbledown cottage in the Forest of Dean, bread had to be begged from kindly neighbours and ‘our Poll’ never had a new pair of shoes. But most terrible of all, at fourteen, she had to leave her beloved forest for the city, bound for a life in service among London’s grey terraces.