London Observed. Doris Lessing

distance. Clearly they are seeing a brown furry animal. If I wear the coat, filling it out with a human shape, it is all right.

      The dogs are teased by the wire. They nose about, trying to remember what their relationships really are with the creatures whose smells start ancestral reminiscences. ‘Come away,’ shout their owners. ‘Come here, Bonzo! Millie! Trixie!’ Every weekend the parks fill with dogs, and this park, an outflank of the Heath, one of the pleasantest, is populated with dogs who have probably spent a sad week shut in houses or even flats, let out, but let out conditionally, off the leash for such a short time and then on sufferance. Dogs who have hardly seen another dog since they were removed from their mother’s teats and their siblings’ play see everywhere big dogs and little dogs, dogs like themselves. ‘Hey, wait a minute – ’ their instincts whisper to them, ‘a dog does not necessarily have to be a human appendage.’ The dogs approach each other, wagging their tails: they sniff bottoms, standing still to be sniffed, or going around in circles while the others nose after infatuating smells – smells that explode in their brains with instructions that contradict everything they have been taught. A dog approaches another with a stick, or with an inviting bark: Come and play, come and chase me. At once a dozen dogs of all sizes are running about and chasing each other, their barks sounding like shouts of joy. These dogs may be descendants of the descendants of house-bound, human-bound dogs, but already they are a pack: you can see the boss dog, and the pack order forming … you can see how they would be left to themselves to forage and chase and fight. And you feel in yourself instincts as old as theirs, when a wolf howling on a hungry winter’s night lifted the hair on your ancestors’ necks. But … here come the owners, here are the humans, they come running to establish order. ‘Come here at once, Bonzo! Gruff! Fifi! Lulu! … Bad dog! To heel!’ The pack falls apart and the dogs return soberly to their owners. ‘Good dog. Good dog!’ And they fall in behind human legs, sniffing at human hands which pat and caress and set down plates of food. But as they go they turn their heads to look back at the other, forbidden dogs. And this look is not only wistful but puzzled.

      There is a bear-sized black dog that comes to the café on the hill where I and friends have spent so many happy hours. As it approaches, heads may turn, there may be frissons of alarm from those who have not before seen the beast. The monster dog sits obediently by a chair while its family goes off to get coffee and cakes. The dog, its lolling tongue like a pink plastic tie, seems to smile as it waits. Here they are, his family! They have brought him an ice-cream. He opens jaws like a bear’s … the ice-cream slides from the cone to the great pink tongue, he delicately swallows, and the cone follows. He flops his black furry tail about and lies down. During the very hot days of last summer two enormous black dogs walked into the pond near the bridge, and they sat like bears in arm chairs, lapping at the ripples, smiling while their young mistress called, ‘Come on, Bruno, come on out of there, Baxter!’ But they took no notice, sitting on their backsides in cool mud, their paws flopping in the water under their chins, looking guilty but not enough to bring them out of the deliciousness into the day’s heat. ‘Come on out