In 1940, his wife Elfrida was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and spent the rest of her life as an invalid, eventually dying in 1943. From 1940 until his death, de la Mare lived in South End House, Montpelier Row, Twickenham, the same street on which Alfred, Lord Tennyson, had lived a century earlier. For the "Collected Stories for Children" (Faber and Faber, 1947), he won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. It was the first collection to win the award.