Eleanor Nesbitt

I didn’t have any special friends at my primary school but that all changed as soon as I started at TH. The friendships that began there now feel increasingly precious.

I enjoyed academic subjects – especially (my A level subjects) French, Latin and Greek. I loathed gym and games – so my least favourite teachers were the ones who inflicted these on me. I loved spending time in the library and in the art studio, where I marvelled at other people’s talent. Best of all were the woods (especially the Y tree) and the pond with its caddis flies and water boatmen and newts. 

I never really left school. After Cambridge and Oxford I taught in a girls’ school in the Himalayan foothills, where the navy uniform was remarkably like ours at TH. Then I taught in a Coventry comprehensive, where I found that three of my pupils were first cousins of girls I’d taught in India, and my interest in Sikhs and Sikhism grew.

In the University of Nottingham I researched local Sikh communities for an M. Phil degree and then I joined the University of Warwick where most of my research and teaching have related to India in one way or another. Gaining a professorship was a wonderful finale.

Talbot Heath provided so many useful skills. Probably the most useful one has been the art of writing a précis (something I certainly didn’t relish doing in those days).

In about 1962 the TH magazine published a poem about my beloved cat, Persil. Poetry has run with me through the decades since. Some of my poems appear in Turn but a Stone, Gemini Four and Making Nothing Happen. Jenny Hare (née Rench) has illustrated fifty of my sillier animal rhymes. (Get in touch with either of us if you’re interested.)

There’s a list of my more prosaic publications on Warwick University’s website here.

I particularly like the cover (another friend’s painting) of Interfaith Pilgrims. I’m happy that Oxford University Press asked me to write (on Sikhism)  for their very tactile ‘Very Short Introduction’ series. It’s very satisfying researching, writing and publishing books. The next (due out in 2019) is Sikh: Two Centuries of Western Women’s Art and Writing. The seventy or so women include Queen Victoria and J.K. Rowling.

My husband, Ram, is from Punjab, though he’s not a Sikh. I have three step-children and four step-grandchildren. Coventry has been home since 1977. With its over 1000 years of religious, literary history it is endlessly stimulating and I enjoy meeting people from so many backgrounds and learning from walkers on the various historical walks I've devised. Living near a bus stop, a railway station and an international airport I feel well-connected with the rest of the world – quite apart from the Internet. I'm looking forward to Coventry's year as UK City of Culture 2021.