Extract A Year in the Mud and the Toast and the Tears by Georgie Brooks

January

‘This was what I prayed for, a plot of land not too large, a
garden, and near the house a fresh spring of water, and just a
bit of forest …’
Horace, Satires, Book II, Satire VI
The hottest summer for over one hundred years is making
me run for the hills – the Adelaide Hills. The temperature
has been over 40 degrees Celsius every day. Adelaide, sited
in the middle of the sweltering Adelaide plains, is filled with
sweaty, whingeing and tired people who are obsessed with
the latest record high. I spend my days in a dark house, with
all curtains drawn against the sun, and the air conditioner
groaning away night and day. Thank God I am not pregnant.
I spent last summer (which was the biggest heatwave of the
century until this one) hugely pregnant and sweaty. I glowed
so much that I sweated a Shroud-of-Turin-style permanent
yellow mark, roughly the dimensions of a hippopotamus,

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onto our mattress protector. This summer I am just huddled
indoors entertaining the baby and the toddler with ice blocks
and a misting spray bottle intended for ironing. I can’t iron so
it is nice to finally have a use for the misting bottle. I have no
conversation except about how hot I am. We are a bit worried
that overworking our air conditioner will cause it to burst into
flames, so we have it set on ‘English Summer Day’ rather than
the preferable ‘Ice Station Zebra’. I am desperately jealous of
my husband who gets to leave the baby, the toddler and me
each day and work as a doctor at a nice cold hospital. I would
love to work somewhere cold. I contemplate retraining as a
mortuary technician. Cold and oh so quiet. Sounds ideal.
My husband and I are slouched on the couch after dinner.
We are carefully sitting apart, like courting Victorians (the era,
not the Australian state), so that we won’t touch and sweat on
each other. Although the sun has set, it is still too hot to sit
outside. I am flipping through the newspaper and enjoying the
breeze each page generates. A simple line drawing of an old
cottage in the real estate section catches my eye. The cottage
is in the Adelaide Hills on about twenty acres of land, with
mature trees, a creek and a spring. It sounds much, much
cooler than our current house. I show the ad to my husband.
He is enthused, but then he is enthused by any new project.

A Y e a r in the Mud and the T o a s t and the T e a r s 7
The man loves a challenge. He has been known to go to the
hardware store, buy $800 of random stuff we don’t need and
then happily try to work out what he can do with it.
We chat excitedly about our bucolic existence in the
country cottage. We’ll have chickens and a huge vegetable
garden. It will be a bit like the old TV show The Good Life ,
except he will still go to work to earn the money to pay for
things. We are not deluded enough to think that we can wrest
a living from the land, in our happy alternative lifestyle. I am
not a pert, tiny blonde with a Felicity Kendal-style bottom,
which also limits The Good Life analogy a bit. I can, however,
as a true child of the 1970s, hum the entire theme tune while
moving my hands in a way that I think looks a bit like the
daisy in The Good Life opening credits. In my alternative
lifestyle fantasy, my children will roam happily outside all day
until they come inside to eat scones topped with homemade
jam. (In my fantasy life I am also patient, unfailingly kind
and an exceptional cook.) We will have a gorgeous garden and
unlimited water to make it grow. Our happy conversation has
the same tone as those enjoyable discussions we have just
after buying a lottery ticket, while we are contemplating how
we will spend our winnings.

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We are fed up with suburbia. The water restrictions imposed
on urban Adelaide because of the drought have reduced the
lawn to a scratchy, moth-eaten brown rug and everything
but the agapanthus and roses have died. My sister-in-law,
as urged by the government, bails her bath water out onto
the garden to keep it alive but I am too lazy. I also secretly
agree with my father who asks what is the point of living in
a first-world city if you have to bucket your own water? We
are also fed up with the noise and neighbours of suburbia.
I don’t like sitting outside for dinner on my own verandah
and knowing everything about my neighbour’s dinner. I don’t
like smelling their lamb chops when we are only having cold
leftovers. I don’t like hearing their dog’s collar chiming on its
dish as it eats. I don’t want to hear about their day at work
or school. To be fair I am pretty sure they don’t like hearing
the baby cry or me shouting at the toddler and the dog (most
of my shouting screeches begin with ‘naughty boy’ so the
neighbours have to really focus to work out who has incurred
my wrath). Our dog, Boddington, is a feisty Jack Russell.
When he was a puppy, I took him to the local dog training
classes where he was sniffed at for ‘not being a proper Jack
Russell’ by the competitive Eastern suburbs dog owners, for
whom breeding is all. At obedience classes I discovered that
Jack Russells don’t do obedience. They’re not like Labradors
and Golden Retrievers and sheepdogs who want to please

A Y e a r in the Mud and the T o a s t and the T e a r s 9
people. Instead they just want to do their own thing, and if
it happens to be something their owners want to do, that is a
happy coincidence. On our final lesson we had an obedience
test. Every other dog leapt with enthusiasm into the routine.
Boddington made the instructor laugh by refusing to sit
properly and instead hovering his bottom defiantly about a
centimetre off the ground.
Boddington gets walked every day when we go to the
shops or to the playground. He has a shocking case of small
dog syndrome, and barks at every large scary dog he sees. In
his own mind, he is clearly a huge Doberman. When he is
at home, he either angles for sole possession of my lap or
lurks near the high chair eating scraps from the floor. Both
children love Boddington and drop food during meal times
just for him. Whenever we bore him, he finds a new way
to break out of our suburban compound to go and explore
the neighbourhood. He likes to sleep on the baby’s playmat,
which I regard as adorable rather than unhygienic. For all his
faults, he’s not a barker. This makes him a rarity on our street,
and our neighbours’ un-walked and lonely dogs bark all day
and nearly all night as well. Their dogs drive me nuts, and are
one of the worst things about being at home during the day.
Every time the baby and the toddler manage the rare feat of
a simultaneous day sleep, a bloody neighbourhood dog starts
yapping and wakes my children.

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What I hate most about suburbia is that if my husband and
I want to have a good bitch about our neighbours and their
cigarette smoke, barking dogs and barbeques, we have to go
inside to be sure we won’t be overheard. It is, as my husband
says, as though we are living in a caravan park, except we
have the same neighbours forever. No one moves on our
street; it is a ‘tightly held’ suburb, in real estate speak, which
could also be code for people who have waaaay overextended
themselves financially and can’t run the risk of refinancing to
move somewhere they can actually afford.
The heatwave is still sweating on. After the children have
gone to bed and we have had dinner and the sun has finally
set, it is still 35 degrees Celsius outside. The sun’s heat is
radiating back from the acres of black tarmac and concrete
around us. We start thinking about the cottage in the Hills
again. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century those
who could afford it moved up to the Hills over summer to
escape the heat of the Adelaide plains. It was kind of like
the Indian Raj, complete with sleepouts, bungalows with
huge verandahs and exotic wildlife. Less tigers though, but
probably just as much gin and tonic. I grew up in the Hills
and although I hated the isolation, the expensive taxi fares
after a night out in town and the very long bus trips to school,
I do longingly remember that I always had a blanket on my
bed, even in summer. We had no air conditioner when I grew

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up and my father, who continues to live in the Hills in my
childhood home, still doesn’t. By contrast, in the city during
summer our whole suburb hums with the roar of competing
air conditioners.
I ring my father to ask him how cool it is but there is no
answer. He must be outside enjoying the air and unable to hear
the phone. We can’t stop speculating about how delightfully
refreshing it must be up there. My husband gets in the car and
drives to the address of the advertised cottage. He phones me
30 minutes later, parked on the street next to the letterbox of
the cottage. ‘It is 19 glorious degrees Celsius,’ he announces.
‘I can hear the frogs croaking and birds singing.’ I am filled
with envy. I get him to drive home to mind the children so
I can have my turn up in the Hills. I drive up the freeway
with the car windows down, enjoying the sensation of the air
getting cooler and cooler as I go. When I arrive, the valley is
encircled by dark hills, with a starry blanket over the top. A
cool breeze rustles the leaves on the oak trees. It smells of hay
and honeysuckle and I think there will be dew on the lawn in
the morning. I am besotted.
The cottage is open for inspection. As usual we load up as
if we are preparing for a six-month backpacking expedition,
but it is just our children and their mountains of necessities