We were in two pairs of seats many yards apart.Leaving the Eurostar at the Gare du Nord in Paris, we took a taxi across town to the Gare de Lyon. Sophie had been eagerly anticipating this bit: she was keen to see the Eiffel Tower, which featured in her Madeleine books. After we’d explained to an incredulous cab-driver why we wanted to go the long way round, we set off and, within moments, Sophie was deeply asleep. But perhaps ticketing arrangements can be improved: having purchased a family ticket, I’d assumed we’d be allocated automatically a two-facing, two-seating configuration But this wasn’t the case. And any buffet car steward who hands out a free biscuit to our passing infant gets our vote.

The train hardly makes a sound, even when it’s cruising along at 300kph. While this may suit a laptopping businessman or someone who fancies dozing from capital to capital, it’s a little wearing for those sitting near to a baby investigating how much noise he can make by banging a toy petrol tanker against the metal fold- down table.The Eurostar staff are friendly, helpful and impressively multilingual. But it is not really suited to infants despite its excellent nappy-changing facilities and lavatories which, with their blue flush water and jets of hot air, can keep a toddler entertained for hours. And, of course, it would be a journey to remember – for the right reasons, we hoped.
Eurostar is as beautiful and efficient as everyone says. People went slack-jawed on hearing that we were to take two infants across Europe on a train They thought we were crazy. Our motive, though, was simple enough: because of the extraordinarily high cost of flying to Pisa (even the “Super Pex” fare is more than pounds 270) a family like ours can save several hundred pounds going by rail. If we’d planned to go hitch-hiking with our children, Sophie and Gus, through Antarctica, sporting only beachwear, the reaction wouldn’t have been much different.

We’d left the Gare de Lyon in Paris at 7.30 the previous evening. The Rome Express, with its azure sleeping cars and exotic destination boards, looked thrilling as it stood, gleaming in the evening sunlight, ready to depart for Dijon, Lyons, Modane, Turin, Genoa, Pisa and Rome. Predictably, it was only during the final leg of the 17-hour train journey to Italy that all four of us – mother, father, two-year-old daughter and one-year-old son – were simultaneously and deeply asleep. But isn’t the war against Hitler a case where such a proposition is arguably true?`The Handyman’ is as the Chichester Festival Theatre to 28 Sept (booking: 01243 781312), then moves to the Richmond Theatre, Surrey, 8-12 Oct Booking: 0181-940 0088. She opines, for example, that “war crimes” is an objectionable phrase because it implies that war is legitimate, only its excesses are reprehensible.

To get into a mind which operates on that dubious basis would be more interesting than listening to the leadenly suspect moralising of the female solicitor. In many ways, the most potentially intriguing figure never appears: the Army Major father who seems to have befriended and sheltered Romka, despite knowing of his crime, because he saw him as his personal “channel of grace”. In the final dismayingly melodramatic moments, the mental strain unhinges Cressida, who effectively joins these nutters. One’s objection is not that the pressure couldn’t cause this to happen, but that her collapse is handled with such a point-making lack of subtlety.Given the shocking behaviour of the war-time Pope, it’s understandable that Harwood should have chosen to make the family Catholic and he is careful to discriminate between good and bad members of that faith. Her increasingly unenviable role is to fulfil the prediction voiced by Frances Hunt’s somewhat creepy solicitor that war-crimes investigations will be a red rag to the Holocaust-deniers. Here, though, as with Harwood’s previous play, an excellent subject is often crudely dramatised, a fact which Christopher Morahan’s production fails to disguise This is particularly the case with the daughter Cressida.

The two Ukrainian witnesses (fellow soldier and a nun), whose concurring separate evidence we hear during the investigation, have no illicit personal reasons for falsely incriminating Romka.More important, I believe, is what the upheaval exposes about the value systems of the people surrounding the elderly Ukrainian. It’s the daughter, Cressida (Kate Lynn-Evans), and Julian (Hugh Bonneville), her impatient, gas-prone derivative-trader husband, whose protected, opera-going world is blasted apart by the arrival of the war-crimes squad.
In fact, the guilty or not-guilty question, with the legal and psychological issues that arise from the lengthy gap in time, aren’t really the drama’s chief concern. The accused is Romka Kozachenko (fine Frank Finlay), an elderly Ukrainian odd-job man who, since coming to England in 1947, has lived as the employee and dear friend of a family of well-heeled Sussex Catholics. The Army Major father, whom he met in a POW camp in Rimini and who eased his co- religionist’s entry into Britain, is now dead.