Full Steam Ahead, Felix

4. Famous Felix

Felix pounced. She succeeded. Her claws latched on to the pigeon’s back and a flurry of feathers burst into the air as though a pigeon-down pillow had exploded on the platform. The holidaying family, having known nothing of Felix’s plot, screamed loudly in alarm, completely terrified, as feathers puffed fulsomely into the air. There was little immediate sign of where they had come from or what on earth had caused this peculiar phenomenon; utterly startled by the explosion, the family scattered, leaving their luggage unattended, and all eyes turned as one to the commotion.

Then, as though echoing their cries, there was a heroic squawk from the pigeon. Amid the flurry of feathers, Percy was still alive and he was flapping, flapping, flapping to try to tear himself free! With an almighty screech and a muscular ripple of his wondrous wings, he somehow managed to pull away from Felix’s clutches, even though her claws had most definitely snagged him. He may have left half his feathers behind, but – to the railway cat’s frustration – he had somehow lived to fly another day. He retreated to the iron girders above to lick his wounds while Felix looked up in absolute disbelief, sitting in a sea of feathers and abandoned cases.

As the feathers slowly drifted back to earth, the family returned to their luggage, their hands to their mouths. No longer scared, now that they realised what had happened, they found themselves laughing instead, giggles escaping them as they took in the unusual scene. Poor old Felix! Denied again!

‘Not to worry, my girl,’ said Angie Hunte later that day, as she watched the whole episode back on the black-and-white CCTV, having been alerted to it by a colleague who’d been present. ‘I love you just the way you are.’

And Angie Hunte was not alone in that. As the summer of 2016 drew on, Felix’s popularity continued to soar as her Facebook friends followed her adventures online. They loved to log in and find out what the railway cat had been up to each day. As only a handful of fans actually made it to the station in person, the man behind the page found he had his work cut out for him to keep the online followers fulfilled. Always there was a hunger for new posts, new pictures and new videos. But he was more than happy to deliver.

His name was Mark Allan, and he was a mild-mannered commuter in his fifties who worked in Manchester five days a week. He commuted through Huddersfield station, catching the 6.40 service each weekday morning. He and Felix had become friends in spring 2015 and he had set up Felix’s page for her shortly thereafter – mostly as something of a creative outlet, given his job in finance was a very serious one. Her subsequent online success had come as a wonderful surprise. Now, with 87,000 Facebook fans (and counting) hanging on the railway cat’s every post, he was rather enjoying the challenge of coming up with new ideas. He found he was always thinking about what he and Felix could do next, and he would mull ideas over even when he wasn’t at the station – just as he did one August day that summer, as he was clearing out a wardrobe in his Huddersfield home.

‘What’s this?’ he muttered, as he reached into the back of the cupboard and pulled out a sorry-looking mess of multicoloured plastic. ‘I remember this …’

It was a blow-up globe – something he’d bought for his children years before to show them the locations of all the countries of the world. He pressed his lips to the toggle and with a series of determined puffs fully inflated the globe. Oh yes, he thought, I can have some fun with this … Given Felix’s fans came from all across the world, from America to Hong Kong and everywhere in between, the globe seemed a particularly apt prop for this global superstar to play with.

The following morning, on 22 August 2016, Mark got to the station around 6.30 a.m. As usual, despite the early hour, there were still a fair few commuters already on the platform, rustling newspapers as they caught up on current affairs and nursing cups of takeaway coffee. It was a rather windy morning and people glared crossly in the direction of the railway tunnels, which were causing the wind to whistle down the platforms towards the King’s Head. Though it was allegedly the height of summer, that bitter wind was a hint that, in Yorkshire, winter is never far away.

Ignoring the weather, Mark walked with increasing excitement towards the customer-information point, already anticipating Felix’s reaction to the blow-up globe. It seemed she was excited too: as she did most days, she was already waiting for him on ‘their’ bench, close to the Head of Steam pub, eager to see what treats he had brought for her today. The pub staff had got there early that morning as well – already, they had their advertising A-frame hoardings out on the platform, promoting the jazz night they were holding in two days’ time.

‘Good morning, Felix,’ Mark said to his little friend, bending down to stroke her as she arched her head into his now familiar hand. Then, without further ado, he whipped out the blow-up globe and proceeded to inflate it with a series of short puffs, attracting a few bemused looks from his fellow commuters. Once the globe was inflated, he popped it down on to the platform, soon followed by a Dreamie to encourage Felix to investigate further. Mark chuckled to himself as he set the scene he hoped to photograph. He could just imagine it: Felix checking out her world domination, looking for the locations of all her many fans. He had already come up with the caption: ‘My global appeal is growing.’ He hoped it would go down a treat.

But, that morning, Felix’s treat was not going down at all. Without wanting to gossip, it is fair to say that she has a reputation as a rather greedy cat, yet this morning even the temptation of a treat had not brought her to the globe’s side, as Mark had hoped. She looked at the scene with caution, none too sure about this latest prop that Mark had brought to their daily meeting. In the business world the mantra is ‘no idea is a bad idea’ – but it seemed that Felix did not subscribe to that particular ethos.

Mark was standing back, his phone ready to take the picture, while he encouraged Felix to come. Usually, she ‘obeyed’ promptly (as much as any cat ever ‘obeys’ a human), eager for snacks and photo shoots. But today she merely narrowed her eyes and looked suspiciously at the globe. Untethered, the beachball-like sphere was gently rocking in the breeze and its independent movement was clearly freaking Felix out. What was this brightly coloured creature, which wasn’t a mouse or a pigeon or a crow? What was she to do with it?

Mark could see pretty quickly that she was not going to come, so he reworked his vision. Instead of snapping Felix next to the globe, he would try to capture it in the foreground with Felix in the background (where she was keeping her distance from this unfamiliar foe). He took a few steps back to line up the shot.

Whoosh! A particularly blowy gust of wind whistled along the platform – and took the inflatable globe with it!

Well, Felix might have conquered her fear of crows, but she was not yet ready to tackle this strange new bird! She legged it – leaving Mark alone on the platform with a runaway globe.

He grabbed for it; it danced out of his reach. He stretched out his other hand; it rolled just that little bit further away. Then the wind gusted once more and the globe flew even further along the platform in the direction of the King’s Head.

Mark started sweating. He had visions of it changing direction and blowing on to the tracks, where it could potentially cause many hours of expensive delays (something that Felix’s employers – and the passengers – would be none too pleased about). Consequently, Mark threw caution to the wind and flung himself after it at top speed, his eyes fixed only on the prize.

Bang! In his focused quest he ran headlong into one of the Head of Steam’s A-frame hoardings. With a cacophonous clatter, the metal advert fell to the ground and all heads swivelled to the commuter. Teetering, he just about managed to retain his balance, if not his dignity, and somehow styled it out. Best of all, he managed to capture the globe. All in a day’s work for Felix’s Facebook manager!

What had been particularly striking for Mark, even in the relatively short time that Felix had become famous, was how very much she meant to her fans. Earlier that summer, there had been a dramatic incident at the station where an armed man had run into the train tunnels. Huddersfield station had been put in lockdown while the police resolved the dangerous stand-off. Felix, sensibly, had tucked herself away during the entire saga and was never involved, but her thousands of fans did not know that. As soon as news of the ongoing drama hit the headlines in the Huddersfield Examiner, her fans were on Facebook clamouring for an update from Felix to let them know she was OK. Mark – who had known nothing of the incident until his account was suddenly flooded with messages – was very happy to let them know that was the case.

Perhaps it was that incident that started more people coming to the station, needing to know she was OK – to see with their own eyes that the station cat was the same confident diva she had always been. There had been a rush of visitors when Felix had first been promoted, but this had tailed off in the intervening months. Nevertheless, that summer Huddersfield station had played host to Felix fans from Switzerland, New Zealand, Kazakhstan and Canada. There was even someone from the Isle of Wight! The team also remembered meeting a blushing bride who had come all the way from Australia to marry in England, and as she’d had a few days spare after the wedding she had chosen to use those first few days of married life to come to Huddersfield to meet the cat. Meeting Felix was, you might say, the icing on the wedding cake.

Felix wasn’t always ready to meet her public. She could be grumpy if she was disturbed from a catnap, and it wasn’t unknown for her to lash out if she was in a testy mood. At other times, she was simply AWOL, off on a patrol, and her colleagues had no idea where she was. However, on other occasions it was neither her mood nor her absence that was at issue. Passenger Stuart Gelder remembered walking through the ticket barriers one day and spotting Felix on the platform … enthusiastically licking a bin bag (one of her not-so-secret guilty pleasures). It was hardly her most glamorous moment. Yet Stuart added affectionately, ‘Even though she wasn’t at her most majestic, I was still ecstatic to have finally seen her.’

Many visitors wanted to see Felix dressed up in her famous yellow hi-vis jacket. Oh yes – she had one too, just like every member of the TPE team. She had worn the jacket when receiving her promotion and the adorable pictures of her in her ‘uniform’ had gone viral. But, not too long afterwards, Felix had thrown a diva strop about wearing the jacket – perhaps feeling, somewhat justifiably, that her pretty black fluff was already perfection … and how could anyone improve on that? Unlike the mere mortal human employees of the railway company, she felt the uniform was beneath her. She had chosen her moment carefully, and then, while dressed up in it one day, she had cleverly run off to one of her favourite hidey-holes: the disused train carriage on platform two. Here she had wiggled her way beneath the carriage, and then wriggled and jiggled until she’d managed to lose the coat. Ever since then, she’d insisted that her birthday suit was all the decoration she needed to meet her public.

It often fell to Angela Dunn, who worked in the lost-property office, to try to help the visitors meet their idol. Angela was a lovely lady with short grey hair and wire glasses. She had been a firm friend of Felix ever since the start. On one of Felix’s very first days at the station, Angela had found the kitten a soft brown bear from the lost toys she cared for, a friend to keep the kitten company in her new home. Felix and the bear had been inseparable for many years, but the bear was no longer on the scene. No one seemed to know what had happened to it, but Felix did not seem to mourn its loss: perhaps another sign that the little cat was all grown up these days. Felix always remembered Angela’s kindness, however. She was a very frequent visitor to Angela’s office.

Although, truth be told, Angela was never quite sure if it was her the cat had come to see – or the collection of snuggly coats and jumpers that made the perfect place for a catnap.

One day, Angela received a message from Mark Allan to say that the mother of an autistic boy had contacted him to ask if they could visit Felix. The team were always careful to emphasise that nobody could guarantee when Felix would be at home. With mice to catch and places to explore and nice long naps to enjoy, Felix simply could not be available 24/7. It wouldn’t have been fair to expect her to be. Nonetheless, Angela promised to do what she could to help the visit go smoothly.

When the day arrived, she discovered that Felix was indeed available and ready to meet her public. Perhaps the cat had taken inspiration from the bronze Harold Wilson statue that stood in St George’s Square outside the station, which the moggy passed day after day. The statue was engraved with one of Wilson’s quotations: ‘The leader of the party, and no less the prime minister, has a duty to meet the people.’ Perhaps Felix had taken his words to heart.

Angela knew which train the mother and son were arriving on and she decided that she wanted to give them a royal welcome from Queen Felix. So she scooped up the cat – Felix, for once, allowing herself to be carried – and headed out to platform one to await their arrival.

Though Angela had never met the family before, she instantly knew – even before they’d left the train – exactly who they were. The beaming smile on the mother’s face told her everything she needed to know. She watched from the platform as the mum guided her son, who was about fourteen, off the train. He wore a bright-blue T-shirt and comfortable Adidas sweatpants and seemed oblivious to the world around him, locked as he was in the world created by the big fat headphones placed over his ears. Yet, as they stepped off the train, his mother touched his arm to command his attention and pointed out the cat, who was now waiting patiently on the platform for him.

The boy turned his head slowly. Once his eyes alighted on Felix, a broad grin spread across his face. He walked over to her and plonked himself down on the platform beside her. And, having homed in on her, she became his world. He simply sat there with her happily, occasionally stroking her or tickling her behind her tufty ears. Somehow, she seemed to be able to tell that she was needed for the long haul, so she lay right down on the platform with him, stretching out on her side and relaxing her snowy-white paws. For the next fifteen minutes, she was completely his. Angela Dunn, watching closely, could tell that the whole experience was pure pleasure for the lad.

Though the boy remained silent, his mum seemed to feel the need to speak. ‘He just loves Felix,’ she confided to Angela. ‘He read about her and he saw her on TV, and I knew it would make his day to come and visit her. And will you look at that?’ she whispered, her voice catching as she watched her boy with the cat he loved. ‘Will you just look at that …?’

Truth be told, the mother wasn’t the only one with a tear of happiness in her eye.

Perhaps a week or so later, Angela happened to be passing by when another family with an autistic child asked to see Felix. This time, the family asked another member of staff, who was not as familiar with Felix’s movements as the lost-property lady. Politely, he had said, ‘Sorry, she is not available’ – but without actually checking for Felix in her favourite hidey-holes.

Well, the little lad was absolutely crushed. There were tears and tantrums and a wailing voice that caught at your soul: ‘But I really wanted to see Felix!’

Angela stopped where she stood, deliberating. The family were already walking away, their shoulders slumped. She hesitated for only a second longer, and then ran after them.

‘Excuse me!’ she called out.

They turned round, the boy still hiccoughing with hurt.

‘I hear you’d like to see madam?’ Angela said brightly, using her personal nickname for Queen Felix. The family nodded, hope darting back into their eyes as they looked at the kindly woman. ‘I can’t make any promises,’ she told them, ‘but let me see if she’s free.’

She found her fluffy colleague dozing in the back office, and on this occasion Felix did not object to being woken. So that little boy got to meet the station cat, just as he had dreamed.

For Angela Dunn, it was a watershed moment. For while she always put Felix’s welfare first, she felt that if Felix could make somebody’s dream come true in such a simple way, it was really important to try to make it happen. After that, she became the main contact for visitors at the station who had come to see Felix (along with the ladies in the booking office, if Angela wasn’t on shift). It didn’t happen all that often, but it soon became a fairly regular occurrence for Angela to assist people who wanted an audience with Her Majesty. She would usher them in to meet the queen and talk them through the etiquette of interacting with such a feisty cat.

That summer, Angela was fifty-three. She had never expected to change career at her age. But it seemed that it was never too late to become a lady-in-waiting – at least, not when it came to Queen Felix.