PRIVATE JAMES CONGREVE FERN
WEST YORKSHIRE REGIMENT
31ST JULY 1918 AGE 19
BURIED: ABEELE AERODROME MILITARY CEMETERY, BELGIUM
At first I thought this had to be a reference to spiritualism and imagined that James Fern's father was complaining that he had not been able to make contact with his son in the spirit world. And in a way it is: Old Pal, Why Don't You Answer Me? is the title of a mournfully romantic popular song, written by Jerome K Jerome in 1920, in which a man expresses his loneliness to his dead wife, wishing she would answer his prayers and presumably send him some sort of sign.
James Fern Snr was a widower, his wife had died in 1916, and James Jnr was their eldest child. Although the song wasn't written until after the war, work didn't start on Abeele Aerodrome Cemetery until 1923, which explains how a quote from a post-war song can provide the inscription for a 1918 casualty.
Old pal, old gal,
You left me all alone;
Old pal, old gal, I'm just a rolling stone.
Shadows that come stealing,
Thru' the weary night;
Always find me kneeling,
In the candlelight.
Old pal, old gal,
The nights are long and drear;
Old pal, old gal,
Each day seems like a year.
No one left to meet me,
After all I've toiled;
No one here to greet me,
It's an empty world.
The long night through I pray to you,
Old pal why don't you answer me?
My arms embrace an empty space,
The arms that held you tenderly.
If you can hear my pray'r away up there;
Old pal why don't you answer me?
Words Sam M Lewis & Joe Young
Music Jerome K Jerome