Felix The Railway Cat

11. Learning the Ropes

Felix watched the world go by from her favourite position by the bike racks. It really was the perfect spot: close to home if a train came roaring into the station, but it also enabled her to keep tabs on everything happening on Platform 1. She pricked her ears up as she heard the flap of big black wings: a crow above her, landing on its perch. She shook herself huffily – it wasn’t a shiver of terror, quite (though perhaps that was only because the scary black crow was so far away) – and then stood up.

Felix had become practised at choosing her moments to explore. From her observation point by the bikes, she was growing used to the rhythm of the station. It was like an industrial ocean in a way: the trains the tide, regularly coming in and going out, washing up people and suitcases on the surf, and then taking away more travelling ‘driftwood’ as the waves receded and the trains pulled out. She used to wait for the trains to leave and for the last of the dawdling customers to disappear from the concourse, and then she’d go and explore.

The older she got, the more confident she became. On this particular late October afternoon, she made her way all the way along to the very top of Platform 1, passing the Head of Steam pub, then kept on trotting, tail in the air, as the concrete walkway magically transformed into Platform 2. Felix dropped her nose to the ground and had a sniff about. Any crumbs? Any scents that shouldn’t be there?

No: all was well. She raised her head again and criss-crossed the platform, veering from the yellow line at the edge to one of her new favourite objects in the station: the abandoned railway carriage.

This was parked permanently on the western side of Platform 2: a navy-blue, ancient, out-of-use carriage with opaque windows. It had been bolted to the ground and had fencing round it, but there were a few gaps in this fence at the bottom, through which a cat like Felix could squeeze. She could then dip down, via the buffer, to the shadowy underbelly of the carriage itself. It all made for a fantastic hidey-hole.

But Felix was staying above ground today. As she slunk and trotted and – yes – rather paraded around Platform 2, she had a little shadow: Gareth, as was his wont, followed her, as vigilant as any mother hen.

Platform 2 was not in use much that particular afternoon, so Felix wasn’t spooked at all as she poked her nose about and generally had a really satisfying investigation. Gareth kept glancing back at the station clock: they’d been out five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen … There was an automated announcing system in place at Huddersfield, which meant most announcements were triggered by a train coming into the station; the human announcer didn’t have to do a thing. This freed up Gareth to enable him to follow the cat about for a fair amount of time. But there were still some announcements he had to make …

Yet on this day, Felix showed no sign of wanting to return to base. They’d been out twenty minutes; now twenty-five … Gareth kept heading towards the kitten, hoping he could scoop her up and carry her back inside with him, but every time he went near her, she moved somewhere else.

After all, there was so much to see! Felix prowled to the very end of Platform 2, where it started tapering down towards the floor, like a bespoke ramp for an inquisitive cat. Beyond this, the yawning mouth of the train tunnels loomed, black and empty-looking. Felix blinked at them with interest, cocking her head to one side – what went on in there? Then her head flicked sharply to the right, to look down on the grassy area over which the tracks ran, just before the entrance to the tunnels. Her ears went up, her eyes brightened, and her legs instinctively crouched down.

On the grassy area before the tunnel, she saw a flash of a little white cottontail – and then another. Boing! Boing! A family of brown-and-white bunny rabbits frolicked before her very eyes. Felix watched them, captivated, as they darted about and then – perhaps sensing the feline’s interested observation – bounded suddenly away to safety.

Felix shook herself and gave a big stretch, all the way along each leg to the tips of her snowy-white toes. The world was so interesting! What more can I discover? she seemed to wonder, as she set off once more on her exploration.

Gareth Hope watched her – in contrast to his name – in total despair. He’d been out of the office for thirty-five minutes and he really needed to get back.

‘Felix! Come on!’ he urged her, but he knew she wouldn’t respond. Cats were famed for their acute sense of hearing, but Felix’s was uncannily selective when she wanted it to be.

I really need to go, he thought. But I can’t possibly get her back.

He watched the cat as she sniffed and prowled about, so confident and carefree in this environment that she now knew relatively well. Gareth and his colleagues had been watching her closely outside for almost two months now. They knew she was a sensible cat: that she wouldn’t cross the yellow line and go down on the tracks; that she knew where home was and could run for it if scared. Gareth glanced back up at the station clock. Forty minutes!

I’m going to have to leave her, he thought. It was a heart-wrenching moment.

‘Felix, I’m going now,’ he told her. The cat ignored him. ‘I’m walking …’ he said, as he turned and took the first step. ‘I’m going …’ He hovered, but Felix wasn’t even looking at him. His shoulders slumped dejectedly. ‘I’ll be back in the office if you need me.’

He plodded up the platform, throwing worried looks over his shoulder, but Felix was absolutely fine. With every step, he fretted. If something happens to her now …

Then he remembered the CCTV and almost ran back into the office. On his computer screen were the various images relayed from the cameras across the station. He scanned through them, looking, looking … And there, frolicking in front of the camera trained on Platform 2, was Felix: a flickering black-and-white figure happily sniffing her way along the ground and absolutely safe.

Gareth pulled the microphone towards him and made his next announcement, the relief audible in his tone, although the customers listening would have had no idea why.

His little kitten was just fine – and the mother hen could be sure of it.

After that, Gareth would occasionally watch Felix on the cameras when she was out and about and he was stuck in the office, but eventually he knew he didn’t even need to do that. His little kitten was growing up fast; she was now too heavy for her climbing trick and was way too big to balance on his head. Where once she could curl up comfortably and settle there, like a cherry on top of a Gareth-shaped cake, she now realised that it was a little too wobbly at the summit, and settled for staying on his shoulder instead.

Felix had the run of the station, but there were two places from which she was banned: the staff mess room, where her colleagues ate their meals and snacks; and the underground labyrinth of abandoned rooms beneath the station (Felix didn’t even know of their existence). She soon had a catalogue of favourite haunts: the bike racks, the abandoned carriage, and the lost-property office. The latter was like a little magnet to Felix, for she absolutely loved it in there. She’d wind her way in, give an affectionate greeting to Angela Dunn, then leap up onto a shelf and fall asleep, snuggled up in someone’s lost hoodie or wrapped in a stranger’s scarf.

Though there was nothing stopping her from crossing the tracks, Felix never did. Her ‘training’ from the team had worked well; or perhaps it was just her instincts that told her she shouldn’t cross the yellow line. The team had worried about her doing that a lot; and with good reason. The station cat at Barnes, Roger, had lost most of his tail under a 455 one day; and he was one of the lucky ones. However, when Gareth asked some of the train drivers he knew about the possibility of Felix getting hit by a train, they’d scoffed at him good-naturedly. They never hit cats, they said. They hit dogs and other animals, but they never even saw cats on the track; the vibrations of the oncoming trains were evident to most felines so early on that if a moggy was wandering about, it had fled long before the train loomed into view.

But it wasn’t just the trains on the tracks that worried the team. Cats can jump up to six times their length, but even with that special skill, for a kitten like Felix it was an awfully long way down to the tracks from the edge of Platform 1 – and even if she had survived the leap, she might not have been able to get back up to safety. Luckily, she never tested her ability.

Far more interesting to Felix than the lure of the tracks were the customers. And in fact Felix – despite her reputation for laziness – turned out to be far more diligent about her station-cat duties than anyone might have expected. Given the freedom to go anywhere she wanted, Felix chose – day after day – to take up her post at the customer-information window, where she’d sit for hour after hour, her tail flicking back and forth rhythmically, as though it was a pendulum on a clock. Felix became quite a talking point for customers – she started many a conversation between a commuter and a customer-service officer, and everyone went away happier for the exchange.

As the weeks unfolded, and the bite of autumn started to nip the air, Felix settled into her new role as meeter-and-greeter extraordinaire. And it wasn’t long before she showed that she was great in a crisis, too.

As it had been in the former office layout, the customer-information window was linked to the now-much-smaller announcer’s office, so it was usually the announcers who dealt with any enquiries; along with Felix, of course. Some of those enquiries were pleasant and polite exchanges – which platform do I need? Can you tell me the next train to Leeds? What time will the 16.46 arrive in York? On other occasions, however, when trains had been delayed or cancelled, or there were emergencies on the line, the customers coming to the desk could be rather irate at finding their travel plans thwarted. As Gareth knew all too well from his time on the gateline, hell hath no fury like a traveller stopped in his tracks.

He was sitting at his desk on a late turn one evening when a gentleman came to the window. Unfortunately, a train to Manchester airport had been cancelled and the man was in a pickle, desperately worried that he and his family were going to miss their flight. During the day, there were trains roughly every fifteen minutes or so to the airport, but it was now approximately 7 p.m. and another wasn’t due for quite a while – and the family hadn’t left themselves much time for their journey.

‘I want a word with you,’ the man said crossly at the window. Felix was asleep in the in-tray on the desk at the time, and she stirred slightly at his raised voice and blinked open her big green eyes.

‘Certainly, sir,’ Gareth said politely, coming over to the window. It was a tricky situation for the railway team to be in, as all they could do was apologise for the cancelled service and say, ‘You’ll have to get the next train.’ But when a customer was worried and wound up, as this gentleman was, it was almost impossible to appease them.

As Gareth had feared, his words fell on deaf ears. The man – who was in his fifties and stockily built – launched into a tirade of complaints; he was really rather furious. His family stood beside him as he fumed, his wife nodding her head at his words, and the little boy and girl clearly dismayed that their holiday might be ruined.

Then the man started to shout.

Ordinarily in that situation, Gareth would have stayed behind the glass window and tried to calm the customer from there. As he nodded sympathetically, however, his eye fell on Felix, who was now alert and standing to attention on the desk. I wonder … Gareth thought. In his campaign with Paul, he had so often said how brilliant having a station cat would be for customer satisfaction – how a cat would calm people down and cheer them up, and make everybody happier.

He glanced back towards the family; the father was puce with rage and his throat hoarse from shouting. There was nothing to lose.

‘Excuse me one moment,’ Gareth said politely. ‘I’ll come out and see you.’

Gareth turned from the window and scooped up Felix with one hand. ‘Time to prove yourself, young cat,’ he told her. He opened the door to the platform and together he and Felix went to reason with the angry man.

‘Oh, a cat!’ cried the little girl at once, as soon as she saw the kitten in Gareth’s arms. She was about six years old and rushed forwards to say hello. ‘Isn’t she lovely, Daddy?’

She clearly wanted to play with Felix, so Gareth bent down so that the little girl could pet her. Felix blinked up at her with her beautiful emerald eyes and calmly let the child stroke her fluffy black fur. The boy, who was younger, about four years old, was a bit shyer than his sister, but he, too, edged forward and extended a hesitant hand towards the adorable-looking cat.

‘As I was saying, sir,’ Gareth continued, from his position crouched on the ground with the cat and the kids, ‘I’m so terribly sorry about the cancellation. The next train to the airport is in twenty minutes. If you get that, you will still make your flight.’

The man looked rather as though the wind had been taken out of his sails. He glanced at his wife, and both of them stared down at their children, who were purring over Felix as though they themselves were kittens.

‘She’s so soft, Daddy!’ the girl exclaimed.

‘In twenty minutes, did you say?’ the man asked, more calmly.

‘Twenty minutes, yes, sir,’ confirmed Gareth. ‘It will be on Platform 1.’

Felix had completely taken the edge off the confrontation. As the family thanked him for his help and the children reluctantly waved goodbye to Felix, Gareth stood up and carried his trusty colleague back into the office. As the door closed behind them, he looked down at her and gave her the most enormous grin.

‘Good work, station cat,’ he told her proudly. ‘Very good work indeed.’