PRIOR to moving from primary school to middle school some 30 plus years ago, it was common to get your friends’ and teachers’ signatures in an autograph book.

I wanted to write something different to the usual rhymes so I asked my mum, now in her mid 70s, for advice, and the rhyme she told me, and which I wrote, was: Little pots of powder; Little pots of paint, Make a girl’s complexion, Something that it ain’t.

I don’t know where the rhyme originates. However, it would seem that G Gregg from Tursdale must have known my mum (who was born in Salford and then moved to Keighley, West Yorkshire) but couldn’t remember the exact words to put into his poem in Readers’ Poems (Echo, May 23).

Lynne Burnett, Darlington