Week 1 Storytelling: The Good Doctor Foster

Doctor Foster went to Glo'ster

In a shower of rain;

He stepped in a puddle, up to his middle,

And never went there again.

*****

     The good doctor Foster was well known through the whole of London for being the best doctor in the whole of England. There was little that his intellect could not master, and the stories of his adventures were passed from child to child, each one embellishing more and more until the tales often became, well, quite like legends, instead.

     Foster himself was getting on in years; when he was young, he traveled the world with abandon, solving problems of people near and far, but now spent his time writing, drinking tea, and enjoying the company of his cat. He was quite the homebody in his old age, which made him even more mysterious to the local children.

     It wasn't uncommon to hear bits and pieces of his stories when walking the streets, and especially the alleys, of London.

     "You mean you haven't heard of Foster," one child would ask incredulously.

     "Foster the doctor! He's been everywhere, knows everyone! Not a corner of the earth that hasn't seen his face," said another.

     "I heard he once fought off a fleet pirates singlehandedly!"

     "My gran said he saved a whole litter of puppies from a burning building when he was only fourteen."

     "Father says he's the very smartest man in the whole of London-"

     "Of England, surel-"

     "He must be the smartest man in the whole world!"

     In fact, Doctor Foster was a very smart man, though probably only the sixth or seventh smartest in the world. Even in his growing age, he was still called away to help surrounding communities when he could.

Houses of Parliament, London, by Claude Monet, sourced from Wikipedia

     On a particular cloudy Tuesday morning, Doctor Foster received word from Gloucester. Their roads had been terrorized by an enormous pothole—cars, already not the safest contraptions to grace the 20th century, were careening off roads with three wheels instead of four, the rogue wheel at the bottom of the hole, the driver wondering what possibly could have gone so wrong. The city was at a loss as to how to fix it, as their attempts to fill in the hole had never lasted for more than a week, and it was truly becoming a menace.

     Never one to pass up a problem, Foster made his way to the train and began the ride to Gloucestershire. As the train ride progressed, the clouds turned to thunderheads, and the rain began to pour. As it happened, Gloucester had been in the middle of a rainstorm for the ages for the past twelve days. ‘None the matter,’ Foster thought. ‘I’ve braved worse, and will brave worse again!’

     When Foster finally arrived, the rain was pouring upon his head. He turned his collar up, pulled his coat tighter around himself, and ventured into the rain. It wasn’t a particularly long trek into the city center, where he was told that the pothole resided, but with the rain pouring down, visibility was continually decreasing. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have come to Gloucester today… Seems a poor day for an adventure,’ the doctor thought to himself.

     The doctor walked on, allowing himself to get lost in thought to distract himself from the rain when—suddenly, the doctor found himself waist deep in water, as if the ground had suddenly gone away. In fact, the doctor himself had been thwarted by the pothole, as if the pothole knew its own demise was imminent, and was taking every step it could to ensure its existence.

     Well, the doctor clambered out of the pothole, no worse for wear and tear, made it to the town council, who was in charge of the pothole, and heard the solutions they had tried so far. They had attempted prayer, of course, they had blocked the hole off for some time, they had tried to tell citizens to avoid it, they stomped their feet and cursed and fumed, but the hole had not gone away. Foster, a reasonable Englishman, simply asked, "Have you tried to fill the hole, perhaps?" 

     Of course they had not, or the doctor's trip would have been entirely unnecessary. 

     With the problem solved and the Gloucesterians satisfied, the doctor, chilled to the bone, vowing never to return to the town with such rainy days and foolish people, came back to London and to the warmth of his own house and could be seen enjoying a cup of tea in the window.

     Already, the children could be heard whispering…

     “The doctor’s back from Gloucester!”

     “Did you hear, he found the Loch Ness Monster!”

     “I heard he sailed the seas, fell into the ocean, and was only saved when he found an underground tunnel that led him to the city…”

     The legends, of course, continued.

*****

Author's Note: My story is inspired by a short nursery rhyme, listed above the story. I wanted a bit of a challenge, so I took advantage of the shortness of the rhyme and tasked myself with answering the questions it raised. Why was the doctor in Gloucester? Why did he never return? Was he a medical doctor, or highly learned in something else? I left some of these ambiguous yet, since I think defining the type of doctor Foster was would strip him of more of his mystery. I hope Foster came across as a kind, if occasionally grumpy, Indiana-Jones type figure. I set it in England largely because it's one of my favorite places (should have listed that in the previous post!) and when referencing the city of Gloucester, it presented an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

Bibliography:

The Nursery Rhyme Book, edited by Andrew Lang and illustrated by L. Leslie Brooke (1897)