Out of the Deep by Walter de la Mare

Walter de la Mare Walter de la Mare is most famous as a poet. He was born in 1873 in Charlton in south-east London not far from Greenwich. It was then part of the county of Kent but has now been gobbled up by Greater London.  He was offered a knighthood twice but declined. De La Mare died in 1956, aged 83, in Middlesex.   He had a heart attach in 1947 and was left unwell until his death of another in 1956. He was highly regarded as a poet and  T. S. Eliot wrote a poem for his funeral service. His ashes are buried in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral.  His writings were a favourite reading matter of H P Lovecraft and admired by Robert Aickman and Ramsey Campbell. His family were originally French, from the Protestant Huguenots who fled persecution by the Catholic King of France. His ancestors had been silk merchants, but his father was a banker and his mother was the daughter of a Scottish naval surgeon. He disliked the name Walter and his friends called him Jack. When he was 17, he went to work for Standard Oil in the statistics department, but he was already writing and his first volume of work was published when he was twenty-nine. He married his wife, who was impoverished after meeting her the amateur dramatic society of which they were both members. They lived in Anerley, where I once lived, a rather nondescript part of South London next to the more famous Crystal Palace. They were apparently great entertainers and hosted many parties. Most of the fiction he wrote was supernatural fiction. His style is elegant but his sentences are complex with lots of sub-clauses making him nearly has hard to read out as Henry James. This is a story written to be read rather than read out, I think. Out of The Deep The story unfolds slowly. Jimmie, an orphan boy has not been ill-treated by his uncle and aunt from what we hear, but he disliked their characters and was tormented by their butler Soames. It appears, though were are not told, that after he became a man, he left them and the hated hous