She was known as the bushwhacker, scourge of elephant hunters of the Transvaal,
since her beloved Dolly Big Ears was taken for her tusks.
However, she was to fall in love with one such killer, Padraig O’Reilly,
a sergeant of The Irish Guards, who vowed to himself, ‘She’s a right pretty gal,
I want to marry her; yes, I truly must.

‘I hope she’ll forgive me for slaughtering her beloved creatures elephantine,
a trade I only took up to feed myself after deserting my regiment. ’

The bushwhacker soon learned that her lover had become a fugitive since he struck his colonel,
Simpson Sup-Lightly, after he’d damned the men of Dublin’s Easter rebellion.

For Padraig was torn between the oath of loyalty to an English monarch
and the dream his old mother often sang,
of a united Ireland, so he had pledged support for the rebels, then deserted before he could face
a firing squad and be executed at dawn.
But the little bushwhacker felt her heart leap when she heard him whistling, I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen,
and she laughed as he talked about his childhood in the village of Rathcoomb.

But the romantic spell was broken by a rifle shot, as another animal was killed for sport,
and the two rode for the safety of the Drakensburg Mountains (above).

There they met Simpson Sup-Lightly, the former colonel, bathing under one of the place’s many waterfalls.

His batman, Michael Monkeaton, told them, ‘The Colonel’s going to turn these into a series of water fountains,
and thus transform this delightful dell into a sanctuary for old soldiers.’

Padraig was startled to hear a shout, ‘Hello sergeant!’, and saw his formerly immaculately-attired officer
sporting a beard and long hair, who declared, ‘Welcome, I’ve had a revelation, that you young Padraig,
are a missionary, but don’t know it.

‘I dreamt that all my former transgressions would be forgiven, if I shook the hand of a soldier
I had once disciplined, because I suffer from guilt and want to clear my conscience.’

The bushwhacker and the sergeant listened, as the colonel declared his desire for a world where there no wars,
and volunteered for a mission to spread love around the magnificent country of South Africa,
a state bedevilled by violence.

They disappeared for many years, but last week a travelling salesman in bullet-proof vests
told the British consulate he’d seen a couple answering their description being pursued by a posse of politicians,
who were crying ‘Peace and love is all very well for the tourists, but it’s no good for our careers’.