Aeolus Still Whispers

A seventeen-year-old boy was a lowly but honourable Ordinary Seaman in the Royal Navy. All his senses awakened instantly at a chance meeting amidst a military withdrawal in early 1970s Malta. A sudden short, kindly interjection of that encounter by a mysterious and extraordinary older Greek woman of rank would quickly change the boys' perception of everything he thought and everything he did.

Notably, it would change the woman's sexuality too.

Malta is depicted in the zeitgeist. Ancient and dusty with two cultures that rubbed along together successfully, it was, to the protagonists, arcane. This gives an idiomatic angle to the lover's thoughts and actions. The Boy is then recast as knowledge becomes empowering & sexy to him. She has her heart finally point her to which path to turn down after standing at the crossroads for so very long.

A jealous officer exposes their elicit affair. The lady is dismissed from the Service and flown off the Island to an unknown location. Heartbreak burns and leads to an unlikely, tragic love affair ending in a murder. It takes over a decade for the boy to discover his Greek lover had died during childbirth and then a heart-rending disappearance of a final love to bring him to a position where a sensory Shaman had shown him that although no one could ever take her place, the void could be filled.