LesleyScoble.com

Written for Lisa/Li’s dVerse Q242 prompt — a 44‑word quadrille using hunger. It sparked a memory of trudging home late across Hungerford Bridge with my two little boys after visiting their cousins outside London.

Hungerford Bridge

on
old Hungerford Bridge
we
cross
the river

going home
later than intended
I shiver 

hungry
stomachs rumble
weary small sons 
grumble

I’m mean

but 
on the other side 
there’s a sweet
vending machine

coin in the slot

three creme eggs
save our lives


—Lesley Scoble, February 2026

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Audio Narration
*Apologies — due to an unforeseen technical hitch, the audio will be uploaded later tonight.

NOTES
In the poem I call the bridge the old Hungerford Bridge—but the footbridge we crossed that night (the Golden Jubilee Bridge) was actually built in 2002, so it’s pretty new. (You can’t trust everything you read in a poem!) When my sons were in Primary School, they painted celebratory pennants to fly on this bridge. Proud mum took some fantastic photos with my old Pentax film camera, and I am now, as we speak, frantically hunting for the prints. If I haven’t posted them, it means I’m still looking.

The original suspension footbridge designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel was completed in the mid‑19th century, so not especially ancient either. The current railway bridge, which runs alongside the Golden Jubilee footbridge, replaced Brunel’s original structure in 1864.

THANK YOU
Thank you, Lisa/Li, for inspiring me to write my quadrille and for sparking the memory of that walk across Hungerford Bridge.

Q242 Hunger Makes the Best of Poetry