A Child in the Forest

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 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 London’s grey terraces.