Editorial: Traces of times gone by

It was such a fine and sunny weekend, without a breath of wind, that a trip to the country was essential. And yet such visits always leave me unsettled.

The French have a term which translated means nostalgia of the mud, and that probably covers it. I'm a sucker for the memory of a way of life my family lived long before I was born, which seems much more dignified, simple, and clearer about the complicated things in life, than the present.

The Wairarapa of my childhood, with its long sunny days, and in winter, frozen puddles and clear skies, is where I feel this most. There are still the tall trees turning red and yellow at Easter, dahlias in front gardens, and runner beans out the back. People still drive about with trailers full of wood for the coming winter, when the smoke from wood fires will hang in the evening over cottages that haven't changed outwardly in a hundred years.

I picked wild apples from the roadside, deep in the country where my family may well have flung the apple core that became the scruffy old tree. Its fruit hung pure and ripe, a waxy yellow and red, an elongated shape we no longer see in apples; it probably doesn't fit today's cartons. They taste a bit like galas. I wish they were more exotic.

My grandmother and her family grew up in a place nearby that is now not much more than a point on the compass. My much older cousin remembers where houses, stores, community halls and council offices used to be, but there is no trace of them. I photographed the house where my grandmother grew up. It doesn't look anything like the photographs I have of my mother visiting there as a toddler, posed on horseback in front of it like a podgy little doll. As a teenager she was flung from a horse on that farm, and suffered a serious head injury. Its aftermath was with her for the rest of her life, quick emotional transitions that could be scary and were quite unpredictable. Nobody knew much about such things then; people just carried on.

My great-grandparents ran the post office. It was a time of horses and buggies, and then the first motor cars. Ten children belonged in that small house, and went to church on Sundays, to a little church I also photographed, the kind of building we call classic, and all the lovelier for sitting among paddocks. The place names in the area were all familiar to me as a child, as adults talked over my head, though I didn't know their exact location. If you travel there with my cousin, every one of them has a story.

What I most envy about all this is the feeling of belonging to a place, and having no great desire to be somewhere else, of my grandmother's generation. When nobody had much, and there was less difference between rich and poor, I imagine that life was less stressful. My grandmother went into service quite naturally - the bit I don't envy, and where my nostalgia for the mud wears off. But she was never bitter about the people she worked for, the way I would be.

How comforting and enviable it would be to live in a world of certainties - if anyone really ever did - where right and wrong were clear-cut differences, honesty paid, and ideas about gender equity, human rights, protection of the environment and biculturalism were in the remote future. Surely that's why people still buy those small-town cottages and put an old sofa on the front porch, to sit on and watch the world go slowly by. I hope they always will, even if I know I'll never be one of them.