The Learner

By Llwellyn Hunt

This book is about 107 pages of experiences that came in useful later in life, including travel experiences, schooling experiences, and work experiences, hopefully to encourage young and not-so-young learners to appreciate the value of learning and that life is an unending learning experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Mar 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491895887

Book preview

2014 Llewellyn HUNT. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/06/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-9588-7 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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CONTENTS

Dedication

A few words of thanks

Introduction

Chapter 1

Memories of Early Life.

Chapter 2

Our first Home

Chapter 3

We learned from our Bicycles

Chapter 4

Our Second Home

Chapter 5

Those Christmas Holiday on Farms

Chapter 6

The EarlyYears

Chapter 7

New Schools

Chapter 8

Vereeniging

Chapter 9

The Apprenticeship Years

Chapter 10

Junior Draughtsman

Chapter 11

Further Studies

Chapter 12

Second Year Studies

Chapter 13

The Welkom Experience

Chapter 14

Learning to fly

Chapter 15

Designer Draughtsman

Chapter 16

Site Engineer

Chapter17

A New Direction

Chapter 18

The Municipal Experience

Chapter 19

The Married Years

Chapter 20

The Recycling

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to

The Parable Of The Talents

Where Jesus taught that:-

Everyone is provided with a different spectrum of:-

‘Talents to Use Usefully’,

and further If You Don’t Use them you lose them.

Also, its not what you’ve got that counts,

Its " what you do with what you’ve got" that counts

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A few words of thanks.

To Jerry Brown who talked me into recording some life experiences.

To my parents who grew up on farms and taught me love of the outdoors, independence of thought, to avoid debt like poison and persistence without which this could not have been written.

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Eirene Mom

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Guy (Dad at 60)

To the surgeons who had me under the knife some sixteen times and the other practitioners who helped to keep me alive and fit enough to write this.

To my young uncle, John Gardiner (Mom’s younger brother) seven years my senior, my role model in life.

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Dr. John Gardiner and family.

To Ferdi Beyers, my first science teacher who inspired in me a wide ranging interest in science, from trapdoor spiders in the veld, to sodium, potassium and phosphorus in the laboratory.

To my mentor Willem Janson who guided my early efforts in valuations.

To Linda Brits who first classified me as a Recycled Teenager, and other friends and colleagues.

INTRODUCTION

My recycling began after age 79, after I had two painful arthritic hips replaced and was able to walk again without pain or a stick. Later again, after cataracts were removed and lenses replaced in the eyes, I was able to play Table Tennis again, even at 86.

Believe me adequate physical exercise is essential if the body and mind are to function properly. The human body is designed to need physical and mental exercise and idleness breeds idleness.

Premature ageing is most likely due to insufficient physical and mental exercise.

Some time ago, I came across the expression-If we stop learning we’re dead

Life is essentially a learning experience. Every situation, challenge, and relationship contains some message worth learning or teaching to others.

They also say we learn by experience, however experience has somewhat cynically also been defined as;- what we have left when we did not get what we wanted

It is surely better to learn from the experiences of others than to make our own mistakes, but to do that, we have to listen and learn from others.

How true this is, but what is also true is that we never know when something we learn or experience however seemingly trivial, may be useful or have another application in later life. But how many of us pass on to the younger generations the real need for much of that useful learning or experience.

An example I like to quote:- In 1933 at age 6 in Standard 1 in Selbourne School in Vereeniging, we were taught about systems of weights and measures. First the Imperial or FPS system with Farenheit temperatures, then the metric or MKS system with Celsius (centigrade) temperatures, then the Cape system where one Cape foot equals 1,033 English foot, Cape Roods and Morgen, also the conversion from Farenheit to Centigrade.

Some sixty years after learning and having almost forgotten about Cape feet, when as a Property Valuer I got involved in doing farm valuations, I came across many Surveyor General Diagrams dating back even to the days of Paul Kruger, before 1899, and those beautifully illustrated diagrams with rivers and hills, were all in Cape Feet, Cape Roods, Cape square Roods and Morgen, so I had to re-learn the necessary conversions and many others.

In later studies of mathematics for the National Diplomas, we learnt about co-ordinate geometry, which was based essentially on the theorem of Pythagoras, generally stated as The square on the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle, is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides and this I had to use often some forty years later, when using figures from Surveyor General Diagrams for plotting in the boundaries of farm portions on the 1:50’000 topo-cadastral maps as needed for my valuation reports.

My engineering exams in the mean time, all with the Imperial system of units and using a five inch Faber Electrical log-log slide rule and four figure log tables, which enabled me to do designs of plant and machinery, were of little help when needing to establish which particular screw thread was in use on some imported equipment from Japan, Germany, America, Scandinavia, or elsewhere.

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In a certain factory we encountered all of the following screw threads:- British Standard Whitworth (BSW), British Standard Fine (BSF), BA threads, British Standard Pipe (BSP), Conduit threads, American SAE as used in automobiles, National Fine (NF), Metric Coarse or M series, metric fine in a number of different series.

To be sure to use the right thread without damaging the recipient equipment, a vernier gauge to determine the diameter and a thread gauge to determine the thread pitch, were in regular use.

We must never be too proud to learn, even from the most unlikely source such as even the crippled labourer on the farm who could milk a cow when I could not.

It has been quipped that when children are small we spend the first three years teaching them to walk and talk, then the next sixteen telling them to sit down and shut up. Those next sixteen are essential in teaching them the skills they will need to cope with life.

Parents should encourage their children to participate in as many different activities as possible. Every different activity leaves a wave trace in the brain helping to develop skills, or to discover where our talents lie, or perhaps even discover our limitations.

Over the years I have participated in the following activities, even if only for one session to discover if I liked it or could afford it:- angling, badminton, bowls, boxing, canoeing, cycling, dancing, farming, flying, golf, hiking, hockey, ice skating, karate, pottery, play reading, riding, rowing, rugby, sailing, skiing, surfing, swimming, shooting, table tennis, tenequoits, tennis, water skiing.

There are three forces in nature:- gravity, magnetism, electricity, that we know how to use, but still do not know what they are, but a fourth force the Life Force, we still have to learn about. We do know that some seeds under the right conditions will survive in a dormant state for very long periods, yet when they get the right conditions of temperature and moisture, they will germinate to give the plant they were originally programmed to grow, showing that the life force had not been extinguished by time.

And now after telling you what I am talking about, let me go on to begin at the beginning and scratch my brains to recall enough memories between the gaps.

Llewellyn

CHAPTER 1

Memories of Early Life

I was born in our home at 52 Beaconsfield Avenue in Vereeniging on 21 St September 1926. There were no hospitals in town in those days. Our home was on the second last stand before the west end of the road which terminated in a tee junction, opposite the gate to the commonage which we called the cow camp, of which more later.

My first conscious memory, one evening a week before my fourth birthday, I lay in bed ready for lights out, there was a nurse in my room when I heard a strange sound and I asked her what it was, she replied, you’ve got a baby brother. With