Travel: Opened secret

Once, Avignon was hell to get to. Now it’s an easy train journey. Let Ysenda Maxtone Graham, who has known it for decades, show you around

The interminable car journeys to Avignon of my childhood! Crammed into the back of the Mini with my sister. ‘Are we nearly there?’ when we were only at Dijon. Hard-boiled eggs and sausages in a polythene bag. The heart-sinking moment when my parents stopped the car for a few hours to have a ‘little sleep’. The bliss of a glace from the Elf petrol station. Not being nearly there even when you were going through the Lyon tunnel. Still at least two hours to go.

Now, if you get the 07.17 Eurostar from St Pancras on a Saturday morning in summer, you can be having a late lunch in the square at Avignon at 2 p.m. Even with the hour’s time difference. It’s a miracle.

MGM made a disastrously bad sequel to Mrs Miniver in 1950 in which they killed ‘the old girl’ (as my grandmother Jan Struther referred to her creation) off. In the late 1960s, MGM asked to renew the rights to Mrs Miniver for a further period, not in order to make another film (how could they?), but to prevent anyone else from doing so. With his share of the money from the sale, my father bought a little flat in the Rue des Teinturiers. What made it irresistible was that if you climbed up a ladder-like staircase, there was a little roof garden with a view of the Palais des Papes. Forty-three years later the flat is still ours, and the same old tin of cassoulet is still being used as a doorstop.

In those days, the sink water ran straight into the gutter, the sewage flowed straight into the street’s canal to be churned up by the water wheels, and at noon there was the non-stop hooting of impatient drivers trying to get home for lunch.