A rather pastoral feel accompanies this week’s simple recipe for a nutty chocolate cake
Having been kept waiting for three hours, Dick Dewy leaves Miss Fancy Day snipping and sewing her blue dress. The plan is that he will return for her a quarter of an hour later, however, Dick convinces himself that he has been scandalously trifled with by Fancy and decides that, to punish her, he will not return. Instead, he leaps over the gate, pushes up the lane for two miles, takes a winding path called Snail-Creep, and crawls through the opening to the hazel grove in Grey’s Wood.
Getting a class of 15-year-olds to relay/read the opening of chapter four of Under the Greenwood Tree, which is memorably entitled “Going Nutting”, is an extremely effective way to engage them with the majesty of Thomas Hardy. And the title is nothing compared to the line (as Dick vanished among the bushes): “Never man nutted as Dick nutted that afternoon.” We were the ones being manipulated, though; our exquisite desk-shaking hysterics feeling like freedom, but in fact keeping us glued to the page and each other. Dick gathered until the sun set and the bunches of nuts could not be distinguished from the leaves which nourished them, at which point he shouldered his bag containing two pecks of the finest produce of the wood.
