Son keeps last date with dad
At Delhi's cemetery, Bill Bombroff could be seen saying a final goodbye to his father, reports Rahul Singh.
Near a white headstone at the Delhi War Cemetery, Bill Bombroff gently placed a card and blood-red poppy flowers. In the pale winter sun, the card read: "Goodnight, Dad."
Bill, 68, had flown down from Bristol, England, to say his final goodbye to his father, Sergeant Henry Bombroff of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who died on June 18, 1944 — one of the many casualties of World War II.
More than 62 years later, at the Remembrance Day ceremony held on Sunday in memory of those who died in the two world wars, Bill said, "This is a corner of a foreign field that is forever England." Till now, Bill had only seen a photograph of the grave.
Lee Griffiths, first secretary at the British High Commission, stumbled across the tombstone of a lance corporal of the South West Borderers Regiment. "He fought with my grandfather," he said.
The ceremony was organised by the British High Commission with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Diplomats, officers and war veterans attended, a poppy bleeding on their lapels as an emblem of remembrance.
Remembrance Day is commemorated on November 11 or the following Sunday, as it was on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 that World War I ended. On Sunday, the last post was sounded at 11 am at the Delhi War Cemetery where 1,121 Commonwealth soldiers were buried.