In Which Ivy's Sisters Teach Jonathan Miller Nothing

 Yesterday, for some reason, I was reading about Jonathan Miller – 'theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humorist and physician', as Wikipedia describes this man of many parts. He was also that rare thing in this country, a 'public intellectual', and, with his massive self-satisfaction and total conviction of his own superior wisdom, a living illustration of why we like to keep them very thin on the ground. 
  Anyway, I was interested to read that, at one point in his boyhood, Miller was taught by two sisters of Ivy Compton-Burnett (a persistent presence in this blog). Young Jonathan, a somewhat difficult lad (or precocious brat, according to viewpoint), spent much of his early life cannoning from school to school, when not enjoying sessions with the  psychiatrist Leopold Stein, in which, by Miller's account, the two 'simply conversed about philosophy and Hughlings Jackson's early neurological theories'. As you do. He encountered the two Compton-Burnett sisters at a Rudolf Steiner school at King's Langley in Hertfordshire (since closed). The sisters were Juliet and Vera, who had survived the high death toll and psychic carnage of Compton-Burnett family life and found refuge in theosophy and the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, turning the house they shared with the pianist Myra Hess in St John's Wood into an 'art house' filled (as Ivy's biographer Hilary Spurling puts it) 'with music, painting, modelling, eurhythmics, all activities that Ivy flatly deplored'. Later they took up residence in Berkhamstead and, while living there, became involved with the school at King's Langley. Miller claimed that during his time with them he 'never learnt anything at all'. For achieving that all but impossible outcome, the Compton-Burnett sisters surely deserve a small accolade.