By Brendan Gunn
Image © PA Images/Alamy
‘Clear Water, that’s what it means, from Irish, ‘Fionn Uisce’. Not the Phoenix that renews itself with fire. Eamon Clearwater, that’s me.’
This is, more or less, how I remember the explanation of his name Éamon Phoenix gave us in his inimitable fashion when we were children running around Cromwell Road and Botanic Avenue in Belfast. Even then he was a curator of facts, enthusiastically collecting knowledge and dispersing it in an unmistakeable breathy idiolect created somewhere between Cromwell Road and the loftier reaches of academia, with a nod towards speech forms from places south of Belfast. Éamon was a couple of years older than most of the small herd of kids in the area. That fact, coupled with his obvious informed intelligence made him the absolute reference authority for most things.
He was also the best runner in the group. At some stage we came up with a plan to get fit on the Towpath skirting the edge of the River Lagan. In preparation for our fitness effort I managed to get a pair of cheap ‘gutties’ (from the original ‘gutta-percha’ rubber used in athletic footwear) as trainers were known in Belfast at the time. Feeling imminent prowess building up in my sporty outfit consisting of gutties, black, very short, cotton shorts and a Wolverhampton Wanderers football shirt I joined the rest at the Towpath entrance near the Lagan Weir. Deep breaths preceded the launch into our run. Eamon arrived and had donned shorts, but still wore his customary leather ‘sensible shoes’, apparently completely unsuited to the athletic endeavour about to start. After twenty seconds or so he seemed to have a rocket booster attached somewhere and took off at a pace that left the rest of us wide-eyed with a mixture of admiration and dejection. He met us on his way back as we puffed and retched towards the designated turning point near a bridge halfway along the path. I seem to remember he was still able to talk, in contrast to the rest, well, myself particularly, and the only breathiness he exhibited was in his usual voice quality as he extolled the virtues of running through nature. It was the beginning of the end for my athletic career.
Éamon’s imagination
From early on in our friendship we knew that the twilight realms of existence loomed large in his imagination. He was the first person to take us to Stranmillis Road, or ‘sruthanna milse’ (‘sweet streams’ he informed us) and the Friar’s Bush graveyard situated halfway up the hill beside the Ulster Museum. He took delight in quoting dates and possibilities, particularly if an eerie quality could be ascribed to them. ‘That’s where the friar’s grave is supposed to be,’ he says, pointing at a small, round-topped headstone protruding from the ground near the middle of the site,
‘Four eighty-five AD. Just after Saint Patrick.’
A quick turn and he points to an area beside the wall separating the graveyard from Stranmillis Road itself. He lowers his tone as he announces with a certain amount of dramatic impetus, ‘… there is the cholera pit, hundreds were buried there in the eighteen thirties and forties. There are famine victims here too.’
Further dramatic intonation informs us that, ‘It can’t ever be opened in case the cholera is still in the soil.’ He loved the idea of the mysterious, the ‘hard to explain’ which sat in contrast to his masterly grasp of facts and empirical evidence. He recounted outlines of ‘The Rambles of Kitty the Hare’, spooky stories he’d read in ‘Ireland’s Own’ magazine, written by one Victor O’D Power. ‘Ireland’s Own’ was an old-fashioned journal containing pieces redolent of an Ireland that has long passed into memory and Éamon revelled in these tales.
His love of the mysterious, the spooky, the undefined shadow wavering in a mist, wasn’t confined to Friar’s Bush and Kitty the Hare’s tales. Gathering and analysing historical facts led him to interact with older residents of the Cromwell Road, Botanic area. As well as listening to recollections and descriptions he loved the inevitable ‘unexplained’ stories, especially those associated with Ireland. I have family connections with Count Fermanagh, so Éamon discussed the well-known story of ‘The Cooneen Ghost’, an early twentieth century account of a poltergeist which was said to haunt the Murphy home in the county. Éamon knew all the details as reported by journalists at the time and loved to pace his own recounting of the events in Cooneen for maximum scary effect. One time he told us about a lesser-known haunted house on the way to Belfast airport outside Antrim. There was a suggestion that anyone interested might go with him and stay in the house after dark to see what might happen. Suffice to say no-one took up the offer and, even with his inquisitive intellect, as far as I know Éamon never ventured there on his own.
The Dullahan
The culmination of these otherworldly histories came when we were teenagers. Six of us, aged between fifteen and seventeen, decided to hitch-hike around Ireland. The plan was to thumb for lifts in pairs and rendezvous at predetermined locations. Setting off with skimpy tents and very little money it was all a great adventure. Éamon was already a source of fact and history as we threaded our way along the east coast before turning west, at which point he introduced the legend of the ‘headless horseman’. We subsequently learned that the story was an ancient one, which exists in cultures all around the world. Our headless horseman was the ‘Dullahan’, a particular Irish manifestation of the phantom. Éamon was the only one who knew about this and as we went west, towards Tipperary, Éamon decided that the Dullahan rode around the town of Clonmel in that county. To add grist to the mill he said the horseman had been seen on the slopes of Sliabh na mBan (the mountain of the women), just outside Clonmel, which is where we wanted to camp. In fairness to those group members who started to get worried by Éamon’s storytelling abilities I will not name any names. Suffice to say that towards evening on the day we all arrived and preceded up the slopes of Sliabh na mBan to pitch our tents a few comments were made to the effect that maybe we should camp nearer the town, and people, even though the mountain was beautiful and an ideal place to pass the night.
Since the whole idea of the adventure was to see the country, Sliabh na mBan remained as the day’s base. It truly was, and is, magical in its beauty. As twilight fell we had eaten our horrible mixture of dried mash potato and strawberry jam (we were unsophisticated teenagers). After it was completely dark Éamon had his prankster hat on and initiated his plan to have a visit from the headless horseman. When all was quiet four of us crept up to where the worried pair were ensconced in their sleeping bags and Éamon tapped lightly on the metal pole keeping the tent upright, making a sound like the bridle and spurs of a horse … and its headless rider. Hearing a whispered ‘What was that?’ from inside the tent we let go with almighty screams of ‘Agh, did you see it?’ and ‘I heard a horse going past’.
The victims’ tent erupted as the two boys catapulted from their sleeping bags and ripped open the tent zip to find the rest of us cowering in fright. Wide-eyed they searched for words as we all huddled together for solidarity in the face of whatever entity had invaded our camp. After a while things settled down. Quiet returned to the mountain and the perpetrators of the hoax crawled into their respective tents as the victims sat up through the hours of darkness in terror.
A debate about whether to let them know it was all a joke ensued between the four plotters. In the end we decided that the explanation might incite violence. The night of the headless horseman remained just that and the worry that he might pursue us for the rest of the trip was a shadow in the background of each subsequent stopping place. Even so, we all remember that trip as the formative adventure it was and the joy of freedom it brought to us as Belfast began to descend into madness.
There were other camping trips with Éamon, but no more headless horsemen were in evidence as the truth meant any supernatural visitor could be easily accounted for as one of his gothic creations. That made a night spent in the Grianán of Aileach in Burt, County Donegal atmospheric rather than spooky and all the more fascinating through Éamon’s explanation of its neolithic origins and fanciful reconstruction by a nineteenth century clergyman. In preparation for the trip the future historian was adamant in the conviction that teabags might be convenient on a camping trip, but were so inferior to tea leaves (not so convenient on a camping trip) that any worthy brew necessitated their use. It was put to him that if he wanted tea leaves he would have to carry them himself, which he duly obliged by doing and generously providing the company with a decent cup of tea. I remember the night in the Grianán well. Far from being spooky it was magical. From the walls around the site you could see the lights of Derry shining in the distance, while down in the central part of the circle a sense of several millennia of history could be felt in the shadows there.
Later meetings
As things go in life we all found our various paths to tread. Eamon’s was obvious and very well known of course. I met him occasionally after we’d had our camping adventures. Once when I returned from working in University College Cork I told him I had been introduced to General Tom Barry in a pub west of Cork city not long before he died. He was fascinated by that and regaled me with details of the General’s role in Ireland’s twentieth century tribulations. We also recalled that I had met Alice before she and Éamon were married, when she and I had student summer jobs in the Department of Agriculture food standards laboratory in Newforge Lane in Belfast.
We mentioned that summer during a chance meeting with Éamon and Alice on the Lagan Towpath. Éamon was his usual friendly self and Deirdre, my wife, happened to mention that our son, Andy, was doing history at school. Éamon promptly offered to lend him relevant notes for various topics and his generosity helped Andy get through his exams. That erudite mixture of knowledge and enthusiasm which has inspired so many was certainly in evidence in this instance. Afterwards Éamon was frequently seen on television of course, as the ‘go to’ expert for any news item pertaining to historical events in a wide range of different subjects. We talked a little about this when Deirdre and I met him again on the Stranmillis Road about eighteen months before his untimely departure. It turned out to be a fortuitous meeting in light of what has happened. Fittingly we were at the top of the hill above Friar’s Bush graveyard when we saw Éamon coming towards us. We stopped to talk and he alluded to much of what I’ve written about in the preceding lines. I’m very glad to have had the chance to chat with him on that occasion when we ranged over towpath walks, headless horsemen and esoteric histories of Belfast and the area around Cromwell Road and Botanic Avenue. He was a one off and to paraphrase Tomas Ó CriomhthEain in ‘An t-Oileánach’, ‘the likes of [him] will never be seen again’. Rest easy Éamon.
About Brendan
As things go in life we all found our various paths to tread. Eamon’s was obvious and very well known of course. I met him occasionally after we’d had our camping adventures. Once when I returned from working in University College Cork I told him I had been introduced to General Tom Barry in a pub west of Cork city not long before he died. He was fascinated by that and regaled me with details of the General’s role in Ireland’s twentieth century tribulations. We also recalled that I had met Alice before she and Éamon were married, when she and I had student summer jobs in the Department of Agriculture food standards laboratory in Newforge Lane in Belfast.
We mentioned that summer during a chance meeting with Éamon and Alice on the Lagan Towpath. Éamon was his usual friendly self and Deirdre, my wife, happened to mention that our son, Andy, was doing history at school. Éamon promptly offered to lend him relevant notes for various topics and his generosity helped Andy get through his exams. That erudite mixture of knowledge and enthusiasm which has inspired so many was certainly in evidence in this instance. Afterwards Éamon was frequently seen on television of course, as the ‘go to’ expert for any news item pertaining to historical events in a wide range of different subjects. We talked a little about this when Deirdre and I met him again on the Stranmillis Road about eighteen months before his untimely departure. It turned out to be a fortuitous meeting in light of what has happened. Fittingly we were at the top of the hill above Friar’s Bush graveyard when we saw Éamon coming towards us. We stopped to talk and he alluded to much of what I’ve written about in the preceding lines. I’m very glad to have had the chance to chat with him on that occasion when we ranged over towpath walks, headless horsemen and esoteric histories of Belfast and the area around Cromwell Road and Botanic Avenue. He was a one off and to paraphrase Tomas Ó CriomhthEain in ‘An t-Oileánach’, ‘the likes of [him] will never be seen again’. Rest easy Éamon.