Walter de la Mare (18731956) was born of a Scottish mother and a father descended from an old Huguenot family. He was educated at St Paul's Cathedral Choir School, which he left at sixteen to work in the City Office of the Anglo-American Oil Company, writing in his spare time under the pseudonym Walter Ramal.
Either because my mother was shy of me, or because she thought vulgar attention would be bad for me, she seldom took me far abroad. Now and then Pollie carried me down to the village to tea with her mother, and once or twice I was taken to church.
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