Zen won, and it was a masterpiece of timing; they completed their shopping while the bread was still warm and before the hippies arrived for their chunks of organic pizza.

Zen stocked up on ingredients for the wheatless ginger snaps she baked herself. Prudence was constantly confused by her husband’s rapid changes in nutrition, but to Zen, with the open mind of a child, her father’s search for perfect health only meant more fun in the kitchen. The sugarless snap, baked without wheat, was one of their more successful inventions, and once the basic recipe had been arrived at, Zen took over the baking, and even improvised. Like most good cooks, potential or otherwise, she was secretive about her concoctions; yet Prudence, who organised the housekeeping, always allowed for large amounts of vanilla essence, oat bran, concentrated apple juice, powdered ginger and cinnamon. Zen shaped the biscuits by hand—too sticky for any other method—and laid them individually on the baking trays. When the undersides were cooked dark, she placed them one at a time into her favourite cake tin, the one with the picture on the lid of Little Lady Bountiful giving food to the gypsy children.

Like most children given free rein in the kitchen, she enjoyed the chance to cook. But what pleased her most was the idea that her father carried her cookies in his pocket across alien territory where only pizzas, croissants, sandwiches, buns, rolls and doughnuts, which flooded the system with acid, were sold. And Zen loved to see her father smile—even if it did make his face look like rubber.

When the girls—which is how Zeno thought of them—reached the snack bar, it was buzzing. Zen spotted two empty seats, and steered her mother towards them.

“You wait there and I’ll get us a drink.”

Zen took off for the counter, soon to return with a cappuccino and a glass of hot water into which she dropped a sachet of Orange Sunrise from her travelling stash. After Prudence had skimmed the powdered chocolate from the top of her cappuccino and spooned several mouthfuls, Zen considered her mum sufficiently awake to chat.

All summer the topic had been her impending period. Zen considered it to be imminent, and Prudence didn’t argue. The other topic was when Zen’s first brassiere could be purchased.

Prudence found it hard to think about what went on at Zen’s school. She had somehow suppressed the fact that she herself had been seduced—or ‘done’ as it was termed then—at the age of fourteen. She was a natural, and loved it straight away. From that first time, she had dreamed only of a man and a place of her own where she could do it whenever she wanted, and not be confined to the park after dark or the deep doorway of the sweet factory. She did not know why she sought to delay her daughter’s maturation as long as possible; it was simply an instinct that she followed blindly. She was relieved when Zen changed the subject and asked how Prudence had been wooed by Zeno.