Blue Pencil, by Gerald Thorne

An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.

Every evening after stand-down, Lieutenant Ashworth sat on an upturned ammunition box in the dugout and read other men’s letters. Nobody had warned him about this part of the job on his training course. He was twenty years old, and he had a blue pencil, a candle stub and a canvas bag of envelopes, and the army expected him to cross out anything that might be of use to the enemy or cause alarm at home.

He did not cross out much. He was supposed to strike through the names of villages, the number of guns, any complaint about the rations that might be thought bad for morale. Most of the men wrote about none of these things. They wrote about the weather, and their feet, and whether the pig had been killed yet, and he read every line slowly, as if it had been written to him.

Private Hollin’s letter was the fourth that night. Hollin was a farm boy from Lincolnshire who could not spell and could not keep his rifle clean, and who had once fallen asleep on sentry duty, for which Ashworth had shouted at him until his own throat ached. The letter was to a girl called Edie. It said that the food was champion and the officers were good sorts and that he was not frightened in the slightest. It said this three times, in three different ways, as if saying it often enough might make it true.

Ashworth held the page nearer the candle. At the bottom, pressed so hard that the pencil had torn the paper, Hollin had written: ‘If I dont come back tell my mam it was quick.’

The regulations were perfectly clear on the matter. He lifted the blue pencil.

He sat like that for some time, the pencil an inch above the paper, while somewhere to the north a single gun fired and was answered. A rat moved along the duckboards. Outside, somebody laughed and was told to shut up. Ashworth looked at the torn place in the paper, and at the careful, crooked letters above it, and thought of Hollin asleep at his post with his chin on his chest, looking about fourteen.

Then he put the pencil down, signed his name across the corner of the envelope, and sealed it.

He wrote one letter of his own before he slept. It was to his mother, and it said that the food was champion and that he was not frightened in the slightest.

What impressions does the writer create of Lieutenant Ashworth? How does the writer create these impressions?

You must refer to the language and structure used in the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.