The Second World War and The Rhodesian Years
C.W. Mercer was re-commissioned in the Royal Rhodesian Regiment, and attained the rank of major. As the war concluded, the couple realised their plan of returning to Cockade – but were disappointed in the decrepitude of the house and the socially-conscious, post-war attitude of their one-time servants. After some months, the Mercers obtained exit visas and returned to Umtali, Southern Rhodesia, (now Mutare, Zimbabwe), where they lived for the rest of his life. Mercer supervised the building of a replacement house for Cockade, another hillside venture, and, in 1948, they moved into "Sacradown", on Oak Avenue. The furniture in France was shipped to Rhodesia, as were the Waterloo Bridge balusters (see The House that Berry Built), which had never reached Cockade, but had been stored in England during the Second World War.
Cecil William Mercer died in March 1960.
Read more about this topic: Dornford Yates
Famous quotes containing the words world, war and/or years:
“God hid the whole world in thy heart.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Against war one might say that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished malicious. In its favor, that in producing these two effects it barbarizes, and so makes the combatants more natural. For culture it is a sleep or a wintertime, and man emerges from it stronger for good and for evil.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead—and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)