Felix The Railway Cat

29. Felix the Facebooker

‘Do you reckon it’s Angie Hunte?’ asked the gateline worker at Huddersfield station. ‘Could she be the one who’s set up this Facebook page for Felix?’

Chris Bamford, his colleague, shook his head. ‘I don’t reckon so,’ he replied.

‘Andrew McClements?’

‘Nah.’

‘What about Geoff?!’

‘Are you having a laugh?’

Relations between the station cat and the crotchety team leader were famously still at an impasse.

‘You know who my money’s on?’ said Chris. ‘I reckon it’s Martin.’

All eyes turned to the unassuming announcer, who was quietly making his way, head down, to the tiny announcer’s office where he spent so much of his time during his shift. Ever since he had befriended Felix with that mouse-on-a-string toy when she first arrived at the station – her very first toy – he and Felix had remained close. Martin even kept a little bag of cat treats for her in his desk drawer.

‘He’s got the opportunity, hasn’t he?’ reasoned Chris. ‘He’s always in the back office. He could be on Facebook all the time and we’d never know.’

The gateline team assessed this possibility with the keen consideration of super sleuths. Ever since Chris had discovered that there was a Facebook page for ‘Felix, the Huddersfield station cat’ – it had come up on his recommended pages and he’d liked it instantly – he and his colleagues had been playing this guessing game, trying to work out who it was that had set it up. The page had been running since July 2015 and it was now December; it had a couple of hundred likes. As more and more of the team had discovered it through their personal Facebook accounts, tongues had started wagging on the concourse about who was actually running it. No one had the faintest clue – but the team were all convinced that it had to be a member of the team. Every day, Chris and his colleagues on the gateline tried to figure out who was maintaining the page and keeping it a secret. It was almost like Cluedo: ‘I think it was Andy Croughan in the team leaders’ office using a smartphone.’

The amount of thought they applied to it would have put CID to shame: psychological profiling, alibis, opportunity and more all came into play. When it came to Martin, the announcer’s notorious quietness at work certainly made him enigmatic enough to be a prime candidate.

‘It’s got to be him!’ exclaimed Chris.

But Martin was coming up for retirement in January 2016, and the others thought it highly unlikely that he’d be at the cutting edge of social media, creating a Facebook page for his feline friend, no matter how cosy the two of them might get in the announcer’s office during Martin’s long shifts. No: they had to think again.

As they investigated the page updates further, they stumbled upon a crucial piece of evidence: every single picture on the Facebook page appeared to have been taken around 6.30 a.m. Whoever was running the page had to be someone who was always on the platform at that time.

The conclusion was clear: it wasn’t a colleague, it was a commuter.

Suddenly, every bleary-eyed customer who passed through the gates was a suspect. With the commuters having season tickets, Chris and his colleagues barely saw each one for longer than ten seconds as the steady stream of early-morning customers flowed through the doors. It was hardly long enough to make an assessment. Most of them walked slowly, somewhat miserably: not yet woken up properly and none too pleased to be there, on their way to work. Others darted through the gates and ran at full tilt towards a train scheduled to depart. They clutched takeaway coffee cups and newspapers, and headphone cables trailed from their ears as they tried to tune out the reality of another working day. There were people in suits, overalls, uniforms and chemists’ smocks; the cyclists arrived like new breeds of human, with orange Lycra skin and angular helmets reshaping their heads. It could be any one of them: it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Could it be the middle-aged woman in the windbreaker who always had a kind word for Felix? Or might it be the hipster who wore media glasses and moleskin shoes and brought the cat treats in a Tupperware box? There was a man with a full beard and long, greying hair who had potential; or what about the redhead with the art portfolio and the sketching pad? The options were literally endless; the mystery seemingly unsolvable.

They never did guess. In the end, a few members of the team messaged the page and offered to help support it by sending through some behind-the-scenes pictures of the station cat hard at work in the back offices, and a channel of communication was opened with the mystery Felix fan.

‘Here,’ Chris said to whoever it was. ‘Make sure you introduce yourself next time you come through. We’ll have a drink or something, get to know each other.’

And that was exactly what happened. It was an ordinary morning, the day the mystery commuter finally walked up and introduced himself. Chris was busy assisting customers when he felt a polite tap on his shoulder at 6.30 a.m. He turned around to see a tall, bespectacled gentleman dressed in a dark-grey suit and carrying a black laptop bag.

‘Hello,’ he said, meekly. ‘I’m Mark Allan. I run Felix’s Facebook page.’

The mystery was solved.

Mark had been commuting from Huddersfield since the summer of 2014. He’d lived in Huddersfield all his life, nearly fifty-five years now, but he’d always driven to work before, being based all over West Yorkshire: Wakefield, Bradford, Leeds … But when he’d got a new job in an office in Manchester, he’d decided to get the train. Every day now, he caught the 6.40 a.m. service from Platform 1.

He hadn’t noticed Felix at first. Many commuters didn’t, being too engrossed in their smartphones or their Metros to spot the railway cat. Mark himself was usually plugged into his headphones, dressed in his dark-grey suit, which, he thought, was the exact same shade as the skies above Huddersfield in winter.

It could be grim, commuting through the Yorkshire winter – but it felt a little like spring had come early at the start of 2015, when Mark had been introduced by the station team to a special little someone.

He’d been walking down the platform that morning, thinking it was just another day, when he’d seen one of the customer-service guys in a yellow hi-vis vest holding and stroking a cat. A cat? Mark did a double take. This must be the station cat. He was famous in Huddersfield (Mark thought she was a boy), but Mark had never seen him.

‘Who’s this, then?’ he asked the attendant in a friendly fashion, pulling the headphones out of his ears and engaging in conversation for once.

‘This is Felix,’ announced Glenn, introducing the cat.

‘Hello there, Felix!’ said Mark cheerily. He reached out a hand and gave Felix a nice stroke. She gazed at him thoughtfully from the safety of Glenn’s arms. ‘My, he’s a grand-looking cat, isn’t he? Very handsome.’

‘Actually, she’s a girl …’

And then the whole story of Felix the station cat was told to him: how she had come to be employed there, and how the team had nicknamed her ‘the pest controller’. In reality, though Felix did still catch the odd mouse, leaving her ‘presents’ for Angie to find, the name was more of a joke than a job description. They didn’t tell Felix that, of course.

Mark wasn’t much of a cat lover, in all honesty. He’d never had cats himself and, frankly, everything he’d seen of cats’ behaviour in his friends’ houses made him think they were a bit of a nuisance. One moggy had completely shredded a mate’s sofa just a month after they’d got it; crikey, he’d thought at the time, my wife would go absolutely up the wall if that happened to us. It’s bad enough having kids, but a cat? No, thanks.

Nonetheless, there was something about the railway cat that he found rather endearing. The feeling wasn’t necessarily mutual – Felix initially viewed him with suspicion, as she did most people she didn’t know, but that was only because her very real experiences with ‘stranger danger’ had made her naturally cautious.

As the months passed and winter at last turned into spring, it became Mark’s habit to walk down to the bike racks and the Head of Steam while he waited for his train; this was also Felix’s favourite spot. The regular sight of the beautiful fluffy cat on a typically grey Yorkshire day – when it was so misty and cloudy you could see only a silhouette of the distant hills and none of the detail – cheered him greatly. So much so that one day he found himself snapping a couple of pictures of her on his smartphone.

Felix, as had become her way over the years, posed for them with the good-natured acceptance of a celebrity who is constantly being stopped and asked to be part of a selfie. She positioned her head handsomely and waited patiently for the shutter to close. As Mark travelled on the train to Manchester that morning, he casually flicked through the snaps he’d taken. She really was a fine-looking cat: that fluffy fur, those enigmatic green eyes, the striking white bib. He uploaded the images to his personal Facebook page – to say, simply, ‘I see this cat at Huddersfield station’ – and thought nothing more of it. But when he next logged in, he was astonished to see that the pictures had got loads of likes; more than he’d had before on any other photo.

Crikey, he’d thought, there’s something going on here.

He’d imagined there must already be a Facebook page for Felix herself – she had been at the station for four years, after all, and within Huddersfield she was a bit of a superstar – yet when he’d searched for one in the early summer of 2015 nothing had come up. That surprised him. Other railway cats had blogs – Quaker, the Kirkby Stephen East moggy, had one called ‘The Secret Life of a Station Cat’ – and they were undeniably popular. In June 2015, meanwhile, there was enormous interest when Tama, the famous Japanese feline stationmaster, sadly passed away at the age of sixteen after years of dedicated service; she was so beloved that 3,000 people attended her funeral. With that level of interest in station cats it seemed only right that Felix should be on Facebook. Consequently, when Mark discovered she didn’t yet have her own page, he decided to create one

It seemed a good idea in more ways than one, and for Mark it personally meant a great deal. Mark’s job was very finance-based and serious, and he thought that creating a Felix Facebook page could be a real laugh. He thought that it might provide him with a creative outlet, mild-mannered businessman that he was. Rather than spending those ten minutes in the morning while he waited for his train looking at his phone or reading the newspaper, he could do something with and for Felix instead. Something fun. Something colourful to brighten up the dark-grey shades of his regular life. He pulled his laptop towards him and began building the page.

The first priority was to decide what to call it. Should it be ‘Felix, the Huddersfield cat’ or just ‘The Huddersfield train cat’ or even ‘The TransPennine Express cat’? In the end, he went with simplicity: ‘Felix, the Huddersfield station cat’. It took about half an hour to set up the page, then he added the handful of photos he’d already taken … and that was it. Job done. So it was that on 2 July 2015, Felix became a Facebooker.

Mark didn’t like to break the news to Felix, but she wasn’t all that popular. Mark shared the page with his own Facebook friends and she got about fifty likes; then one hundred, as those friends shared it with their friends. But it was small-scale stuff.

That didn’t matter one bit to Mark. As the summer of 2015 wore on, he found he fell in love with running the Facebook page for Felix. It gave a bit of a kick to his morning to come onto the platform and find out if she was there – and, if she was, to stage an impromptu photo shoot and have a bit of a play with her. He enjoyed coming up with ideas for what her posts might be and the more he got to know her, the easier it became to think of what she might ‘say’ if she was running the page herself. By September, being Felix’s Facebook manager had become a bit of a minor obsession. It had added so much to his life that Mark wanted to give something back to the cat at the centre of it all – so he started bringing in treats for her on his morning commute.

Mark didn’t know that Felix favoured Dreamies. He just bought an 80p bag of a supermarket’s own-brand treats – but Felix, as it turned out, wasn’t fussy when it came to the calibre of her canapés.

The first morning he brought them in he greeted her with a scratch of the head, then got the treat bag out of his backpack. Immediately, Felix was up on her feet, gazing at him lovingly as though he was the most fascinating creature she had ever come across. She followed him eagerly to the metal bench where he normally sat and gobbled up the treats one by one; he gave her just a handful. They had a really nice time together before the 6.40 arrived and Mark ran to catch it.

The following day, the same thing happened: a head scratch, followed by a handful of treats on the bench. It wasn’t long before Felix grasped that this was a fellow she really wanted to be with every morning. Mark would never forget the day he entered the station and started walking down the platform towards the Head of Steam, only to find Felix sitting waiting for him on their bench. She turned her head towards him as he approached. ‘Welcome,’ the flash of her green eyes seemed to say. ‘Yes, you are blessed: I have deigned to wait for you.’ She greeted him affectionately when he sat down and rubbed behind her pointed black ears. From that moment, a new routine was forged.

Every morning, the cat and the commuter rendezvoused at 6.30 a.m. by the Head of Steam. The team no longer wondered where the cat was at that time – for she was always with Mark. Sometimes she’d eat the treats from his hand; at other times he’d flick one off the seat of the bench with his finger to turn it into a game. Felix, delighted, would bound off the bench and be after it at once, enjoying the drama of the hunt. He got to know her well and learned how streetwise she was; not only about crossing the tracks, but also at staying out of the way if a delivery arrived for the pub or if a catering trolley was being noisily loaded onto a train. Felix pretty much waited for him every day without fail, but if for some reason she was kept away, he would leave the treats for her on the windowsill above the bike racks.

When he came back in the evening, those treats were always gone.

Sometimes, Felix would run to meet him when she saw him striding along the platform towards her. The pair would then walk side by side back to their bench: the best of friends. Despite his previous disinclination towards felines, Mark found himself softening. He hadn’t especially liked cats before, it was true – but then he’d never met a cat like Felix.

As the pair grew closer, Mark staged more and more ambitious photo calls. One favourite was when he pulled his laptop out of its bag on the platform and opened it up for Felix to ‘use’. With a treat placed upon the keyboard, she was more than happy to pose with the computer. Mark added an amusing caption to the image: ‘Excuse me, can you press “ctrl, alt, delete” for me?’

Perhaps the funniest time, though, was when he brought a loaf of Warburtons in with him and asked Felix to pose next to it. The other commuters gave him strange looks as he crouched on the platform with a packet of bread and a cat – he looked like an absolute lunatic – but it was all in honour of his art. The caption read, with feeling: ‘Felix: the best thing since sliced bread.’

Come 31 October, he was having great fun with apps and posted an image of Felix where she was surrounded by cartoon ghosts in celebration of Halloween. He was getting a brilliant response to his posts, and by the time the team started joining in too, just before Christmas (Glenn and his girlfriend Teresa became heavily involved), the page was up to nearly 500 likes. Mark couldn’t believe it: this was beyond his wildest dreams! Never had he thought the page would become so popular.

Felix, had you asked her, would never have had any doubt. Day after day she showed her character and spirit. Andy Croughan was astonished one night shift when she escorted him to the takeaway shop: she sat outside and waited for him to order, before walking companionably back with him to the station, as though they were a couple who had just nipped out for fish and chips. Michael Ryan got a shock when a passer-by tapped him on his arm as he was walking through Huddersfield town centre one afternoon and said, ‘Excuse me, is that your cat?’ He looked round in surprise to find Felix walking neatly behind him; she’d been following him for five minutes ever since he’d left work, looking for all the world like a feline soldier on a passing-out parade. She was so far from home that Michael turned right around and walked all the way back again, Felix following meekly till she was home.

Sometimes, she playfully harked back to the days of her kittenhood. Andrew McClements was standing chatting with Dale, one of the customer-service team, one day when he saw a sudden look of surprise – and pain – cross his colleague’s face. Felix had decided to climb up his back, as she used to do with Gareth Hope when she was a tiny kitten.

But she wasn’t a tiny kitten now – and Felix’s claws were not forgiving once the whole adult weight of the cat was channelled through them. Despite Dale’s shock and involuntary wiggle, she valiantly climbed right the way up to his shoulder and even placed her paws upon his balding head. But it was all a bit wobbly and she didn’t stay up there very long before she executed a dramatic gymnastics-style dismount.

Another time she tried that trick, however, she found a much more willing accomplice. Adam Carter, a young blond man who worked in customer service, was doing a night shift one early morning in the winter of 2015 when it happened. He and Felix had just opened up the main doors so that customers could gain access for one of the night services. The Metro had already been delivered so Adam grabbed a copy and started reading it.

Felix clambered all over him while he did so. She sat on his shoulder for a while, sticking her nose into the news, as though she was a curious fellow commuter straining to see the article in his paper. Then she seemed to think, I wonder … Hesitantly, she made the final ascent onto Adam’s head. This time, she managed to get her balance just right and became terribly comfy up there, perched on Adam’s hair like a live version of a Russian shapka hat. She was too big to get her tail up there too, so this hung rather obviously all the way down the side of Adam’s face. It would occasionally tickle his nose as Felix wagged it in pleasure at having successfully returned to one of her all-time favourite perches. At four and a half years old, she was very heavy, but it was a pleasant weight and Adam didn’t mind it; he thought it was quite funny.

The cat and the customer-service assistant were discovered sitting like that in the ghost-town lobby when some customers came onto the concourse.

‘Morning!’ Adam said to them cheerily, speaking from a face full of cat tail.

The customers looked over at them. There was a bit of a pause, and then they seemed to think, Forget it … ‘Morning,’ they merely said gruffly in response. Another eight customers came through the gates, and not one of them blinked an eye.

After all, it was only the station cat – and everyone knew Huddersfield had one of those.

To Queen Felix’s dismay, though her fame had grown, people were perhaps becoming a little bit used to her. In December 2015, Felix was not the star of the TPE Christmas card from headquarters. They chose a child’s drawing instead; can you imagine?

Angie was spitting feathers, and if Felix had ever managed to catch any of those pesky pigeons she would have been too. When Angie opened the envelope that held the Christmas card and pulled it out, Felix was sitting alongside her at her desk. As they saw what was on it – and that it wasn’t Felix – the two girls looked at each other levelly in mutual disapprobation.

‘Yeah, I understand, Felix,’ Angie said in agreement, easily reading the disapproval in the cat’s haughty emerald eyes. ‘It should be you, Felix. Don’t worry – I’ll have words.’

Angie talked to everybody about the shocking fact that Felix wasn’t on the card – she even complained to one of the managers. ‘Where’s our Felix? We can’t have a Christmas card without our Felix!’ she cried passionately.

But, of course, nothing was done. The railway cat was old hat. Just as Billy had once warned Gareth, she’d been in the same job too long. ‘You’ve got to move on,’ Billy had told the young announcer in his gruff old voice. ‘If you don’t move every three or four years, people will think you’ve given up, and they’ll never think of offering you another job.’

The pest controller had been at Huddersfield for nearly five years now. Was it too late for Felix to land a promotion? Maybe the station cat wasn’t destined for greatness after all …