Felix The Railway Cat

20. Queen Felix

The customer came rushing onto the concourse. ‘There’s a cat on the track!’ he exclaimed in horror. ‘She’s going to get run over!’

The team in their hi-vis jackets sighed – not another concerned customer.

‘She’s fine, sir,’ they reassured him. ‘She knows what she’s doing.’

‘But what if a train comes?’

‘Trust us, it’s fine. She’ll get up and walk away.’

Outside, at the centre of all this fuss, was Felix, sitting calmly at the midway point of the tracks while commuters gathered in concern, looking as though she was saying, ‘What?’ with a disdainful flicker of her big green eyes. In truth, it had become a bit of a favourite game of hers to saunter out to this centre-stage point, a bit of a wind-up that gave everybody on the platform a good old fright; clever as she was, people never, ever saw her on the tracks when a train was actually due.

Felix herself was no longer frightened of those trains. The kitten who used to run for home whenever they roared into the station now blinked at them nonchalantly. If she was in the middle of a really thorough wash, she might not even look up. The lack of fear didn’t mean that she was less cautious, simply that she felt completely confident in her skill and in her knowledge of the station.

That knowledge grew wider day by day. With her access-all-areas pass, Felix’s horizons expanded. She started coming back to the station with brambles and bushy bits in her fur – clear evidence that her explorations were taking her further afield. Even on the station itself, she would strut about authoritatively, strolling along the front entrance as if she owned the place – and what a place it was.

The façade of Huddersfield station, rather aptly for such an elegant cat as Felix, is a grand classical portico with majestic pillars; its design was based on the palazzi of Renaissance Italy. The poet John Betjeman once said it had the finest façade of any such building in the country – and English Heritage agreed, selecting it as one of its top ten favourite stations in England. An architectural journalist, meanwhile, thought it so magnificent that he described the station as ‘a kind of stately home with trains in’. It has to be said: it suited Felix down to the ground. And at 416 feet in length, such a stunning façade provided quite a catwalk for the railway cat.

It was almost as if Felix knew she fitted the part. Drawing on her stately surroundings and her new-found confidence and maturity, Felix’s gait now took on an unmistakeably regal air. When she strolled or even simply sat down, her striking head would be held high, as though she were looking down upon her subjects; her imperial procession through the concourse announcing, ‘I’m ready for my public … I’m making my entrance now.’

Something in the proud way Felix carried herself reminded Angie Hunte of royalty. It is indeed apt that female cats are called ‘queens’, for Felix was most definitely cut from royal cloth. So emphatic was the imperial impression she gave that Angie now nicknamed her ‘Her Majesty’.

And, as befits a monarch, Felix made sure that she chose only the best spots on the station for her latest adventures. Beyond the car park and the King’s Head was a somewhat unkempt, overgrown area that lay beyond the white picket fence of the station’s boundary. Filled with long grass and wildflowers, this became her ‘country retreat’, where she could play among the sweet-smelling grass and rub her back along the plants. Inside the station, as the summer of 2013 drew on, she asserted her ownership of the place by taking up residence on the concourse, where the large windows created glorious sunbathing spots on the white tiled floor. The sun would stream through the windows in shafts of light, creating spot-lit patches in which Felix could indulge in a luxurious catnap.

And those catnaps wouldn’t be quick. Felix would bask in the warmth of the summer sun for hours on end. She didn’t care that she might be spread-eagled in the middle of the queue for the ticket office: this was her kingdom and she wasn’t moving for anybody. Her subjects should circle around her, like the planets do the sun – she was as immovable as a star. If someone addressed her, perhaps asking her to shift so they could move forward, she would look up at them with a supercilious scowl, but she would not move, and in the end they would simply step over her and carry on.

By far Felix’s favourite spot on the station, however, now that she had mastered the art of crossing the tracks, was Billy’s garden.

Billy’s garden was the station garden: another of his inspirational ideas to create something a little bit different for everyone who used the station and for the local community.

For years, there had been a patch of near-jungle located just back from Platform 4 – it was formerly Platform 7, but it had been taken out of use years before, allowing ugly weeds and gnarled trees to take over. Whenever he passed it Billy had used to mutter what an ‘absolute waste of growth’ it was.

‘It needs chopping down and then you could have a lovely garden,’ he would say, moaning about how dreadful it was that something wasn’t being done to improve it.

Well, as was Billy’s way, he had moaned and moaned and moaned – and eventually, after years of complaining in the right managers’ ears, he had got a green light to do something about it at last. He had even roped those managers – and the British Transport Police – into his vision. ‘You lot can come down and help,’ he’d told them bluntly, and there had been a weekend when the station was alive with the puffs and pants of Billy’s assembled motley crew as they tore apart the thick undergrowth with secateurs and chopped down the tangled trees.

That clearance had taken place when Gareth Hope still worked at the station. But getting rid of the bulk of the jungle had only been the first step – Billy then had to put in hours and hours and hours of work to clear it all, enhance the soil and pull out all the knotted roots, and eventually choose new plants and nurture them. The garden was Billy’s passion and he was the only one who worked on it, so it had been years in the making. Billy gave it what time he could, and even did a bit of maintenance and horticultural work while he was on duty, if it was a quiet shift. Yet there were many times when the team at the station would see him over there on his day off, dressed in his overalls and digging away with his own tools, one of his cigarillos clutched in his hand whenever he took a break. In Billy’s opinion, if you were going to do something, it was worth doing properly. Within that gruff exterior beat a heart of gold. Billy cared – and every green shoot that flourished in that garden was proof of it.

He didn’t care at all, however, for the regal cat who now decided that his growing plants and damp soil bed were the perfect setting for her royal commode.

‘Felix has been in my garden again!’ he would complain to Angie – and with good reason, for he often heard his fellow team leader say to the railway cat: ‘Isn’t that a lovely garden? Are you going to pay it a visit?’

‘Don’t you dare encourage her, Mrs H!’ Billy would say grumpily. He had a real love/grump relationship with the station cat.

As she did with the other team leaders, Felix would follow him around devotedly on his shift. Billy was still as unimpressed as he had been when Angie had first proposed he used the cat harness; he’d look down at his little shadow and mutter, ‘I’m not wandering round with a cat at my heels.’ But Felix wanted to be with him because he was fun … occasionally. Time and again his colleagues would walk in on him dabbling his fingers through the hole in the desk for Felix, as the cat’s captivated eyes followed their every move.

There were times, though, when Felix thought he was playing, and Billy was most definitely not. During one infamous night shift, Billy was working on his period-end paperwork, stacking up all his papers in tall, organised towers that literally took him hours to erect in the correct order. Felix slipped inside the team leaders’ office and surveyed those towers with glee. Then she flew across the room, pouncing and playing, sending the papers flying all over the office in her wake. The Destroyer had struck once more.

Felix may not have been endearing herself to Billy very much at that time but she had clearly impressed the railway powers-that-be. In the June of 2013, Huddersfield station installed electronic ticket barriers at the main entrance for the first time – and Queen Felix found she had her own personal cat flap installed to allow her to come and go as she pleased.

As with any royal event, it was covered by the press: once again Felix made the hallowed pages of the Huddersfield Examiner. This time it was the station manager, Paul, who spoke to the journalists, telling them, ‘Customers and staff hold Felix in great affection and she’s very much part of daily life here at the station. We strive to offer the best service possible to both customers and their four-legged friends and we know Felix is certainly the cat that got the cream with her very own VIP entrance and exit!’

It was a very smart creation, edged in blue and with a cartoon image of a black-and-white cat on the flap itself – and cartoon trains on the surrounding framework. TransPennine Express had commissioned original artwork, for the cartoon cat, just like her real-life inspiration, wore a hot-pink heart-shaped name tag. The pièce de resistance and final flourish was that, above the flap itself, Felix’s own name was picked out in handsome blue lettering, leaving no one in any doubt that this edifice was just for her.

But despite their commendable efforts, Felix was not impressed. In a diva-like response that was typically Felix the station cat utterly refused to use the bespoke cat flap installed for Her Majesty. If she wanted to get from the main entrance to Platform 1, she would run straight at the booking office and leap up at one of the serving windows, little caring if her sudden appearance made the customers standing at the counter jump ten feet in the air. She would bestow on them a gracious nod, then head straight on through, jumping down from the desk inside the office and sauntering confidently to the interior door. There, she would sit and wait, wagging her tail, until a minion had opened the door for her and she could continue on her way.

If the booking office was shut and Felix was forced into a tight corner, she still wouldn’t use the flap. People had seen her heading towards it but, at the last moment, choosing to squeeze round the edge of the frame that held the cat flap – for there was a slim gap between the frame edge and the wall, which she could just slink through – rather than going through the flap itself.

It was just the sort of behaviour her colleagues were coming to expect from Felix. Angie had noticed that she no longer drank the water regularly laid out for her in her bowl. Instead, she would jump up to the sink, where the tap would sometimes be dripping. Felix would carefully shuffle on her bottom to the very edge of the sink, gracefully thrust her head forward and stick out her tongue to catch the fresh water drops, as if tasting manna from heaven.

She was a bit of a fussy eater, too. Though sometimes she would wolf down her ‘Felix’ cat food hungrily, at other times she would merely lick the jelly from the chunks of meat, as though selecting the choicest morsels, and leave the rest.

Billy thought she was spoilt, especially with her brand-name cat food.

‘Oh, just go into town and get a tin of any old cat food,’ he used to tell Angie. ‘She’ll eat it, mark my words. When she’s hungry, she’ll eat it.’

There came a day when one of the other team members completed the food shop for Felix and indeed picked up a tin of any old cat food. It was a household brand name, so it was tasty, high-end stuff, but it was not the eponymous ‘Felix’ that Felix herself had always favoured.

That night, as usual, Felix wound her way through Angie’s legs and miaowed for her dinner. She had had a hectic day patrolling the station and was in need of nourishment. Angie scraped the new branded food into her bowl and set it down, to the musical accompaniment of Felix’s satisfied purrs that her demands for food were being met.

Then the purrs stopped abruptly. Felix’s nostrils and whiskers quivered as she inhaled the unfamiliar aroma of her dinner. She dropped her head and looked at it quizzically. She edged a little closer and gave a deep sniff, as though making absolutely sure. Then she sat back on her haunches haughtily and looked up at Angie with an imperious glare, as if to say, ‘What is this?’

Angie shrugged her shoulders. ‘Eat,’ she encouraged her. ‘It’s good.’

Felix bent down again to her supper dish and gave it one more sniff. Back up to a sitting position she came again, and once more gave a demanding ‘Miaow!’ But there was no other food available.

As soon as Felix understood that, she took off from her meal and made a disgruntled exit: a most dissatisfied customer. She left that unappetising new food in her dish, and did not go near it again.

Angie fretted to Billy about it, but he gave her short shrift.

‘She’s ruined, that cat,’ he said bluntly. ‘She’s spoilt. When she gets hungry enough, I promise you, she’ll eat anything. Ours do at home. Just leave her be and she’ll come round.’

But this was a battle of wills that Billy was not destined to win. He and Felix both dug their heels in, but Felix was adamant she would not break. She was Felix the station cat and she liked ‘Felix’ cat food – and she would eat nothing else. In the end, Angie ended up going out mid-shift to the shop on the corner and buying some ‘Felix’ for her to eat. Felix gobbled it up gratefully, glad the stand-off was over and all was right with the world again.

With such grand behaviour becoming infamous in and around Huddersfield station, what happened next was perhaps no surprise.

Felix was summoned to the theatre. Her star potential had been spotted – and she was about to take to the stage.