Let’s pull all these fragments back together and see what we have. Here’s the original snippet.
It was the year of the great storms. They began in May, even before the winter had started. Shrieking and raging out of the south, the Antarctic winds seemed to have lost themselves and come up howling in a frenzy to find the way. In June they flattened the sedge, rooted out some of the bushes that had crouched on top of the sand-hills for years, and blew out one of the iron sheets from the humpy. Hide-Away tied wires to the walls and weighed down the roof with driftwood and stones. In July the winds lost their senses. Three great storms swept out of the south, the third one so terrible that it gathered up the sea in mountains, mashed it into foam, and hurled it against the shore. The waves came in like rolling railway embankments right up to the sandhills where Hide-Away and Storm Boy lived. They lashed and tore at them as if they wanted to carry them away. The boobyalla bushes bent and broke. The humpy shivered and shook. Even Mr Percival had to go right inside or risk being blown away.
Here are the examples we've been building:
It was a summer with no rain. On the first of December the water turned off and the heat turned up, like someone had flicked a switch. Staring and glaring at the city, the blazing sun seemed take malicious pleasure in attacking anyone and anything that couldn’t go somewhere cooler for Christmas. During January the city cooked, baking metal, bitumen and concrete alike, and anything left outside for more than ten minutes was impossible to touch with bare skin. Amelia started to wear gloves when she was treasure hunting and left the tap near her mattress on a small trickle so that the black cat had cool water to drink. By February, the sun seemed ready to explode. Bushfires raged in the bone dry bushland surrounding the city, the closest one so large that its smoke covered everyone, blinding eyes and choking lungs. The haze hung like a smothering grey blanket in the street where Amelia and the black cat lived. It gradually infested and invaded everywhere the sun couldn’t, as if it were a footsoldier sent by an angry orange general. The black cat sulked and slept. Amelia coughed and cursed. She retreated, withdrawing to her mattress, even giving up her treasure hunting to protect her body from sun and smoke.
It was the summer of the flood. The rain began in November, well before school had finished for the year. Hissing and purring all day long, the rain sounded like a radio trying to find a station until eventually it became background static that everyone ignored. During the last two weeks of school it thickened into a downpour, shrouded the coast in a darkness so thick that Moreton Bay Island vanished completely, and pounded the town so ceaselessly that the drains and gutters turned into fountains. Xavier gave up the umbrella and raincoat, and accepted being soaked all the time. Just after Christmas, the rain vanished, leaving the bright sun and blue sky to stand helplessly as the floods took over. The waters gathered in the mountains to the west then poured into the South Pine River, opened it like a zipper and spilled over the banks and onto fields and roads and houses in a vast, unstoppable tide. In Sandgate, the water rose like a bathtub slowly filling, first in the wetlands, then the streets, then under Xavier’s house. It creeped and crept around the steps like a cat trying to find its way in. Street lights twitched and shorted. Parked cars floated and spun. Xavier had to watch it all from his bedroom window because the police didn’t want spectators or looters.
And below is your version, joined together. You'll need to delete some paragraph breaks.
Is there anything you want to edit? This is your last chance to make improvements before we conclude the lesson!
