Felix The Railway Cat

17. The Pest Controller

It wasn’t as though she hadn’t tried. Felix was well-practised at her prowling technique. She knew how to drop to her belly and creep along; knew (in her head, at least) that she had to stay still until the last possible moment and then pounce. But none of her oh-so-serious stalking sessions was ever successful.

She’d given it her best shot with the rabbits, but they had bounded away infuriatingly fast. Next, she’d turned her attention to the pigeons (much less scary than the crows). It was easier said than done to catch a bird, however, not least because the savvy pigeons tended to save their scavenging trips for when the railway cat was AWOL. You’d sometimes get one doing a reconnaissance trip, soaring the length of the platform with its cat-seeking radar on high alert, a drum-roll sound echoing under the iron roof as its flapping wings beat out a rhythm. If she was there, the bird would keep on flying, doing a graceful curve at the end of Platform 1 before ascending into the girders in the roof, where he would join his fellows to coo the warning: ‘Not yet.’

But, every now and again, one brave (or foolish) pigeon would totter along the platform within Felix’s sights, its head bobbing like a woodpecker’s as it greedily tried to pick up crumbs from the platform, moving its beak so fast it was a blur.

Felix would be hiding in the bike racks: they acted as a kind of camouflage to conceal her from pigeons as well as noisy trains and people. She would crouch on all fours, the tension in her limbs palpable, as slowly, slowly, slowly she sneaked forwards like the predator she knew in her bones she was. There was a certain pride in her movements, a commanding authority, as though with every calculated step she was broadcasting the message: ‘Look at me, I’m a predator. Watch out, world!’

But, somehow, even though Felix’s brain was saying, ‘Easy … easy …’ the closer the cat grew to the pigeon, the more excited she became. Maybe this time she would do it! Her impatience and pure exhilaration at being in the hunt would bubble up and get the better of her and, way too soon, she would spring up and rush headlong at the bird. It was always long gone before she got anywhere near it. So, to cover her humiliation at once more losing her prey, Felix would be forced to sit down incongruently and start washing herself, trying to give the impression that she had just fancied a change of scene for her ablutions. ‘Pigeon? What pigeon? I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said her too-focused licks of her fur. She had nailed the nonchalant, nothing-to-see-here look at least.

She’d even tried to have a go at dogs. Well, they were another animal, weren’t they, and they were on her patch. She’d try all her usual stalking techniques, but they would always end in failure. Felix would be concentrating hard on the canines in her cross-sights, but had she looked up at their human escorts, she would have seen the shock writ plain across their faces at seeing the station cat trying to hunt their darling dogs. Depending on the size of the canine in question, the object of Felix’s attention would sometimes find itself swooped up into its owner’s protective arms.

But the dogs were hardly in danger. Despite Felix’s best attempts – and she spent hours practising pinning down her soft mice toys, a skill she had mastered since kittenhood – she seemed unable to catch a thing. It was all a bit of a poor show for a pest controller.

Felix’s failure to hit her ‘targets’ hadn’t gone unnoticed by the team.

‘Waste of space, you are,’ Billy would say to her, though there’d be a smile in his voice. He’d shake his head in mock disgust. ‘Call yourself a pest controller? Useless. Absolutely useless.’

But Billy was forced to eat his words one day. He and Angela Dunn had been out on Platform 1 and were making their way back into the office when they suddenly noticed that Felix was acting most peculiarly in her lair by the bike racks. She was absolutely transfixed by something on the ground, and looked almost as if she was smiling.

‘What’s she got there?’ Angela asked Billy, as the two of them paused, then crept closer to the cat.

There, laid out before Felix like a sacrificial offering on a silver platter, was a mouse. It was still alive, and it looked uninjured so far, but it had clearly wandered right into Felix’s field of operations and was very, very much regretting that decision.

Felix, on the other hand, was delighted. She gazed down at the mouse, not letting it out of her sight – but had she made eye contact with Billy, she might well have been tempted to tell him with a flash of her green eyes that she very much hoped he savoured his enormous slice of humble pie.

The only problem was that now Felix had caught the mouse, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

She lifted one of her white-capped front paws. The mouse, eyes alert, trembled where it lay on the platform, fearing the blow that must surely come. But Felix merely patted it with her paw, as she did with Angie’s arm when she wanted a cuddle. The mouse shivered and quivered, but Felix didn’t scratch or skewer it; she simply patted it gently with her paw. She moved it along the platform, she pushed and poked at it. She looked rather like an engineer pondering a complex piece of machinery, thinking, But what does it do? How does it work?

Slowly, the mouse started to recover its equilibrium. As Angela and Billy watched, and Felix kept on with her somewhat simple-minded patting, the mouse assessed its options. Like an SAS expert, it quickly recalled to mind its own mental ‘blueprints’ of the immediate station vicinity, and the nearby location of all the mouse-sized subways, tunnels and holes.

Tap, tap … went Felix’s paw. She looked down quizzically at her prey.

And then the mouse legged it. Operation ‘Escape the Cat’ was underway.

Stunned at the sudden movement, Felix narrowed her eyes and tried to follow the darting mouse – but it was far too quick for her. In the wall at Felix’s back, just behind the bike rack, was a small metal grate, with holes just big enough for a tiny rodent to squeeze through. Felix dashed to the wall, but it was too late. As she pressed her frustrated face to the bricks and the metal grate, the mouse was home and dry.

Angela and Billy burst into laughter.

‘Oh, Felix!’ cried Angela affectionately. ‘Bloomin’ heck, love. You’re not supposed to let them go!’

Poor old Felix. But the pest controller of Huddersfield station was a clever cat and, now she had some hands-on experience, like the most eager intern she was as keen as mustard to land a real job with the skills she had learned.

She stayed by the bike racks. It had worked for her with mouse number one, and she trusted its sturdy metal docking gates like firm friends. Felix shrewdly started using the bike racks to help her in her quest to catch her first mouse. She used to trap the rodents by the silver limbs of the bike rack, and pin them there with her paw. She was starting to feel she’d got the hang of this mouse-catching business now. For a game, she would let them go a certain distance, then she’d pin them again. Let them go … Bring them back. Let them go … Bring them back. Felix started to enjoy herself. Then, one day by the bike racks, when Felix was about a year old, she jumped all over the mouse she’d caught – she just went for it, fearlessly, claws and teeth and all – and it was game over for the mouse. It was an instinctive assassination.

Felix felt so, so, so proud of herself. She picked up the dead mouse in her jaws and trotted up to the door of the office, where she knew Angie Hunte was working. She wanted to show her what she had done. Her tail stood tall and straight as she walked: a flagpole that perhaps she wished she could run a banner up to read: ‘FELIX CAUGHT A MOUSE!’ Her hips and her shoulders almost shimmied as she walked the few short paces to the door, the pride rippling down her back. Just wait till her mum saw this.

Angie opened the door and saw the dead mouse hanging limply in her baby’s mouth. She nearly had a fit.

‘Felix,’ Angie said, trying to control her queasy dismay, as the cat looked perkily up at her, waiting for the shower of praise she knew must come, ‘I love you to bits.’ Felix’s tail wagged proudly. Yes, here it comes … ‘But I really, really don’t want your presents, my darling.’

Angie was more than a bit squeamish about the dead mice and rats that Felix now brought to her, again and again and again, as the station cat got into her stride. But Angie couldn’t bear to deal with dead vermin. The lads she worked with helped out instead.

‘I’ll get rid of it, Angie,’ they would say. And when they came out to collect up the bodies, Felix would finally get the praise she was after. ‘Well done, Felix!’ her colleagues would chorus. ‘Who’s a clever pest controller?’

With Felix’s career going from strength to strength, someone at the station clearly thought her achievements needed formal recognition. On the wall in the team leaders’ office hung a hierarchy chart of the company: a diagram with everyone’s names and job titles listed, showing who reported to whom. The chart was shaped like a pyramid, the general members of staff at its wide bottom, the team leaders in the narrowing middle and above them, at the apex, Paul, the station manager.

Someone – and no one, to this day, has ever confessed who – now took a pen and drew a little box above the manager’s name. In it, they wrote: FELIX.

‘Well,’ said Angie, ‘as far as we’re concerned, she is the Boss!’