Publisher's Synopsis
Winifred Foley grew up in the 1920s, in a world of unspoilt 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 as a playground. But a brother and sister were dead in infancy, bread had to be begged from 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 14 little Poll had to leave her beloved forest for the city, bound for a life in service.
