Felix The Railway Cat

25. Meet the Boss

Billy’s garden was now complete in terms of planting and design – but as any gardener knows, a gardener’s work is never finished, so he was still doing regular maintenance of the little patch of land on quiet shifts and on his days off, occasionally with a fluffy black-and-white shadow at his feet.

However, Billy had recently had another bright idea about who could help him with the garden maintenance – and it wasn’t Felix! Instead, Billy had wondered if he could perhaps get some of the local community involved; he had a vision that maybe a group of young people he knew, who all had learning difficulties, might be able to join him in helping with the garden. They’d then have a patch of the station they could take pride in. They could enjoy seeing the plants grow and come to appreciate how their care of those plants created real beauty. Their involvement was a way off yet – there were lots of hoops to jump through first – but when Billy had a vision for something he kept plugging away at it, and he planned to be no less dog-with-bone with this concept than he had been with so many other projects he’d turned his mind to over the years.

The station – as the team knew well – was much the better for his input. Not only was his ‘Art Station’ project still running, after a successful two years of exhibiting local artists’ work on the concourse, but Billy also won an award in 2014 for his environmental innovation (his second in five years). Over time, he had transformed the station’s green credentials, putting in place a traffic-light system for switching off plugs (to cut down on unnecessary electricity use), installing water-saving gadgets in the public toilets and revolutionising the recycling processes. Even in the garden, he’d recently devised a rainwater-capture system to keep the garden green. When new ‘young un’ Chris Bamford joined the station in 2014 – he would be doing a bit of everything: the gateline, announcing and customer service on the platforms – he found Billy’s work impressive; and the man himself very funny, even though he was incredibly blunt and direct (some might even have said rude). Mr Grumpy was still in position, but despite his best efforts he seemed to be endearing himself to more and more people by the day.

Yet Billy, the relatively important team leader, wasn’t the colleague to whom Chris was introduced first when he joined the team. That honour, naturally enough, went to Felix. In fact, the very first thing his colleagues said to him on his first day – as they did to all new recruits – was, ‘Have you met Felix yet?’

‘No,’ Chris replied, intrigued. ‘Who’s Felix?’

‘Let’s get you introduced to her,’ they told him, smiling. And they made sure those introductions were complete before they commenced any of the induction formalities. They had their priorities right: ‘Meet the Boss, and then we’ll deal with the station.’

In truth, in Felix’s three years at Huddersfield she had confidently assumed a supervisory role over every department, so perhaps it was only fair that Chris should meet the colleague who would be keeping a very close eye on his performance. When Felix wanted to be, she was immensely curious about every aspect of the station team’s work – and had the attention span to sit and watch everything she possibly could. As she did so, she seemed to take a step back from the colleague she was observing, as though she was about to scribble thoughtful and perceptive notes on a (very well concealed) clipboard.

It was like having an inspector in. She would sit for a long time watching the booking-office team serving at the windows, appraising their performance. She would balance on top of the monitors or the printers, and keep tabs as the tickets came out. When the cashing up was being done or the Securicor man was dropping off more money, Felix would be there, keeping a close eye on the cash: the multi-talented, multi-disciplined supervisor extraordinaire.

Chris laughed when he realised just who ‘Felix’ was. A friend of a friend of his had worked at Huddersfield station just before he’d joined, so he had heard on the grapevine that there was a resident cat at his new workplace – but he hadn’t known her name. Now, he did.

As it happened, Chris was allergic to cats. But it wasn’t as if he could do much about that! And, as he settled into the station, over time Felix seemed to help him build up his tolerance until he was absolutely fine in her presence.

That first week, however, he was perhaps apprehensive about working with her in more ways than one. For as Chris learned the ropes, just as his colleagues had warned him, ‘the Boss’ was on his tail. On one of his very first shifts, Felix joined him on the gateline. Yet she hardly set a good example: she sat squarely in the stream of customers coming through the gates so that they had to move around her. Worse still, she just glared, Medusa-like, at every single customer coming through.

Her grumpiness had become more pronounced as she grew older, and Chris was seeing it in action today. There were some people she liked – such as the Felix charmer, Dave Chin, into whose arms she would still leap for an upside-down cuddle – but many others whom she didn’t. If she didn’t know someone, she was likely to regard them with deep suspicion until they had proved themselves trustworthy.

Given this reputation, perhaps Chris gulped as this temperamental terror headed straight towards him, insolently swishing her fluffy black tail. Felix had evidently decided to assume a new gateline position. She suddenly (and rather unexpectedly) sat down firmly on Chris’s money bag, which he’d momentarily left out on the side while he got himself sorted.

Chris needed that money bag in order to serve his customers. But now, with an adult cat sitting heavily upon it, he couldn’t get to his cash.

‘Uh, Felix?’ he asked, feeling somewhat self-conscious to be talking to a cat. ‘Could you, er, move, please?’

Felix stared at him stonily and yawned her most bored and uninterested yawn. Chris rubbed his hands over his black-bearded face and sighed, thinking hard. It seemed like the worst kind of initiation ritual imaginable for one’s first week in a new job: a deliberately difficult boss who seemed set on sabotage. He’d expected there to be lots of skills he’d need to acquire to become adept at his new role – he hadn’t expected one of them to be mastering the art of removing a cat from a money bag.

But he did it, in the end, and in time he began to learn other things, too, including how to shift Felix without waking her if she was spread-eagled across the keyboard in the announcer’s office when he needed to use it. The desk had always been a favourite location for a catnap, but she took up rather too much room now.

Despite Chris’s growing skill in handling her, Felix, mischievously, seemed set on making the new boy’s life difficult. She would plonk her bottom on the microphone button, stopping him from making an announcement – and as she did it, she would gaze at him with a twinkle in her big green eyes, as though she knew exactly what she was doing. Or she might paw at his arm to demand his attention just at the time he needed to focus on a CCTV image, or even when he was midway through broadcasting an announcement over the tannoy. He would somehow manage to finish what he was saying without making an error, then turn to Felix.

‘What do you want, cat?’ he would ask.

And she’d flick that fluffy tail of hers, as though to say, ‘Wouldn’t you like to know.’

There came a day when it was very clear what Felix wanted. She was miaowing insistently for her dinner – and, this time, she really was hungry, for the team leader on duty had been caught up in an emergency. Seeing this, Chris said to his human colleague, ‘I’ll take care of t’cat.’ So he and Felix had gone into the kitchen together and he’d sorted out her supper.

After that, Felix’s assessment of this ‘young un’ seemed to change. Oh, this one feeds me, I’ll follow him … she seemed to think. Whether he wanted one or not, Chris now had a buddy for life.

Angie Hunte could have told him that Felix was the very best buddy you could wish for. It’s lonely at the top, and with the way the shifts worked for the team leaders, nine times out of ten they would be on duty on their own – managing a team, sure, but with ultimate solo responsibility for the station. Only very rarely would Angie get a chance to sit down with Billy or one of the others with a cup of tea to talk through the frustrations and worries of the job. Yet she found that Felix, ever-present, was always willing to listen with an attentive twitch of her white-tufted ears – and the cat made the perfect sounding board for gripes about work. Sometimes, she was the only ‘person’ around whom Angie could talk to.

‘For God’s sake, Felix,’ she might rage at the cat when one thing or another had come up. ‘I’m fed up. I’m absolutely fed up!’

Felix would jump up onto the desk and come padding over to Angie’s side. She would sit down, yet she wouldn’t beg or paw or purr as she sometimes did. Instead, she seemed to listen, as if she knew that that was what Angie needed of her at that moment. Felix could be a diva, it was true, but she could also be a very good friend.

Which was why Angie always had the same response whenever customers asked her what would happen if Felix jumped on a train – or was escorted onto one by a joker. ‘What if I took her on a train?’ they might query, provocatively.

Angie would narrow her eyes. ‘You’d have me and thirty-five colleagues after you,’ she would say tartly. ‘It’s really not worth it.’

But while Felix was going nowhere, one part of her – a part that had become rather famous – now completely vanished.

In the summer of 2014, Felix’s long-time glitzy pink collar and her heart-shaped name tag went missing without a trace.

To this day, no one knows what happened to them. One day Felix was wearing them, looking as glamorous as always; the next, her neck was bare. Did she slip the collar off herself, as she used to do with her kitten cuff? Or did it get caught on something during one of her explorations, and was even now hanging from a prickly bush or dangling over a precipice?

Whatever the story, the cat wasn’t telling it. She preened and fussed in Angie and Angela’s hands as they exclaimed over the pretty collar’s absence, but Felix’s head-tossing look wasn’t quite as effective without her bling.

Much more important than her fast-tumbling glamour credentials, however, was the fact that, without a collar, Felix was wearing nothing that told people she was a railway cat who belonged to the Huddersfield team. Without a tag, she could be stolen – or get lost. If she ended up in Domino’s Pizza now, there would be no happy ending to the adventure.

It became a priority to get Felix’s identity back as quickly as possible. The team wanted everybody to know that Huddersfield station was where she lived; where she belonged. Angela Dunn went out to buy the new collar, and she raced as quickly as she could to the pet shop.

But there was disappointment as she surveyed the collars on display. Felix had looked so stylish in her pretty pink collar that Angela had been planning to get her the exact same shade again – but there were no pink collars available except for really over-the-top designs with bling literally hanging off them, which were totally impractical for a railway cat who every day went travelling across the tracks. Yet Felix needed a collar today – no one wanted her to go one more night without some form of ID. What if tonight was the night someone snatched her, as they’d done two years before? What if tonight was the night that Felix got hurt far from home and no one knew to call the station when she was found? It didn’t bear thinking about.

Angela frantically rifled through the offerings: a panic search of the whole stand. Nothing seemed appropriate for Queen Felix. She took every single collar off the hooks, searching, searching, searching … And there, at the very, very back, practically the last collar she examined, was a glittery deep-purple number that exactly matched the colour of the TransPennine Express logo.

It was perfect. ‘On brand’ for the company cat. Elegant and smart. But most important of all, of course: glamorous.

With the pink heart-shaped tag now gone for good, Chrissie – who had originally bought that distinctive ID – kindly commissioned a new identifier for Felix: this time it was a slim gold circular disc. It was engraved with the same details as before: Felix’s name and address on the front, and the team leaders’ mobile-telephone number on the back, so that Felix’s family could be found if she ever went missing again.

With a tiny purple bell added as a final flourish, Felix’s new ensemble was complete. What a stunner she would be in it!

The station team cooed over the cat like true fashionistas as she strutted up and down her platform catwalks, displaying the purple accoutrements just as a supermodel would the new Dior couture in Paris. Yet – to Angie’s surprise – when Billy saw the cat’s new glittery get-up, he didn’t say a word. There was neither commendation nor condemnation; a far cry from his outspokenness when Felix had first got dressed up to the nines all those years before.

But Billy had not been feeling well lately. In October he started suffering from a spot of heartburn and a bad sore throat, an affliction which seemed to grow steadily worse as 2014 drew towards its close. Come November he was feeling so poorly that he called the station manager, Paul, and informed him that he’d regrettably have to take a bit of time off sick.

Felix, however, was not under the weather at all. Rather, she went from strength to strength. That December, to Angie’s delight and pride, the station cat was once again chosen to be the star of the official TPE Christmas card.

As for where Felix would spend the holidays, it was Jean Randall, in the booking office, who that year volunteered to take the cat home for Christmas. She didn’t know it when she signed up, but it would turn out to be a Christmas she would never forget.