Full Hearts And Empty Bellies

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 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 a…