Full Steam Ahead, Felix

6. Christmas Wishes

‘’Tis the season to be jolly! Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!’

The harmonies of the TPE choir soared right up to the high ceiling of the concourse of Huddersfield station. Dressed in their smart navy-and-purple uniforms, about a dozen of the TPE team – from all over the network – got together each December to go carol singing around all the stations. It was a railway tradition that always told the team at Huddersfield that Christmas was just round the corner.

And what a year it had been for Felix the railway cat. She had started 2016 as a hard-working but relatively unknown station moggy. Now, twelve months later, not only did she have the promotion she had always dreamed of, she was also a global Facebook phenomenon. Whoever was doing her end-of-year appraisal surely had to give her top marks!

It certainly seemed that Felix’s accomplishments had not gone unnoticed – and not just by TPE. As the year came to a close, a few attempts were made to headhunt the station cat for a whole new career.

‘Training up the new British Transport Police recruit!’ was the caption on one Facebook photograph, of friendly Felix beside a uniformed BTP copper. ‘Detective Felix at your service!’ Given her criminal career as a cat burglar, however, it perhaps wasn’t the wisest move …

On another occasion, Stephen Hack from Reading, who was a railwayman himself at Basingstoke, tried to coax Felix away to tackle their pigeon problem. (Little did he know about Felix’s ‘pigeon issues’, but she did excel at banishing them from the platforms at the very least.) Basingstoke station was home to so many pigeons that on one occasion more than thirty of them had lined up along a road bridge at the end of the platform, as though they were posing for an end-of-term class photo. Yet Stephen’s attempt to bribe the station cat with a lifetime’s supply of Dreamies was doomed to failure; Felix wouldn’t leave the wonderful family she had at Huddersfield. And that family now turned their attention to one of the loveliest activities of the live-long year: putting up the station’s Christmas tree on the concourse.

Ever since she was a kitten, it was one of Felix’s favourite days. The moment she saw Dave Chin ambling along the platform with his arms full of Christmas tree, or Chrissie from the booking office gathering up her box of festive decorations, excitement began to build in her belly. TPE always chose a gloriously tall tree and for Felix it meant a tip-top playground.

For years, Felix had made it a habit to climb all the way to the top of the tree. There, she would cling to the tallest branch like a lookout on a pirate ship, watching below for trouble or treasure. Allegedly, the gold cardboard angel who shared the uppermost branch with her was the climactic ornament in Chrissie’s multicoloured display, but Felix knew the truth. She was the bestest, fluffiest bauble of them all.

With great excitement, Felix skidded into the lobby and surveyed the playing field. Chrissie had already completed her decorations, so Felix enjoyed a bat-and-forth session with the glinting spheres, as they spun and sparkled on the ends of the quivering, pine-scented branches. Soon enough, however, she turned her attention to the big climb.

Felix arched her neck backwards as she looked up at it. It seemed a very, very tall tree this year. Did she really use to go all the way to the top? Felix gave a harrumph and sat with a sigh on her ever-increasing bottom. It seemed an awfully long way up this year … Nevertheless, undeterred, she flexed the sharpened claws of her paws and went for it, scurrying up the tree trunk with nimble efficiency.

Unusually, this year she abruptly stopped halfway up. Then, like a high-wire artist edging out from the rooftop of a New York skyscraper, she tiptoed out on to a sturdy midway branch. Feeling it was more than strong enough to take her weight, she then settled down with her back against the wooden trunk.

Well, what a cosy spot! Green pine branches attractively fringed her viewpoint as Felix curled up in the scented grotto of her elevated lair. With branches all around her, it was a snug in every sense of the word. In fact, in some ways this was even better than the top of the tree, for the overhead branches partly concealed her from view. Felix, a cat who was so often on display, seemed to enjoy carrying out covert ops for once.

She gazed below her at the concourse. There were Karl and Sara, talking nineteen to the dozen as usual; Sara let out a huge guffaw at some joke that Karl had cracked. She could see, too, the purple-shirted Friends of Huddersfield Station, as they guided visitors to Huddersfield’s hidden gems. The station also regularly played host to local companies who sold homemade cheese, bread or pies right by the gateline, and her nose twitched wistfully as she watched shoppers being handed their tasty treats.

There was another attraction in the lobby too: a portrait of Felix herself. And not a simple child’s drawing or a rough sketch – this was a top-notch, bona fide professional painting, such as might hang in the corridors of power in a stately home. Its magnificent vision suited Queen Felix down to the ground.

The portrait had, in fact, had its grand unveiling just a few days before, and the guest of honour at the dedication ceremony had been the town’s deputy mayor. Displayed in a dramatic, bespoke and rather gaudy golden frame – which included a diamanté tag declaring its subject as ‘Felix’ – the portrait was now unmissable in the lobby, hung prominently on the white wall beside the gateline. It had been painted by the professional artist Rob Martin, who regularly travelled from the station as he went about his work. Earlier that year, the team had mentioned to him about doing a painting of their senior pest controller and the idea had become reality.

It was an incredibly striking piece of art. You perhaps noticed first – as you did with the real cat – Felix’s gorgeous big green eyes, which were wide and reflective. Rob had captured her fluff and her whiskers, her tufty ears and her white-tipped tail with genuine skill – all the more impressive when you learned that he had not asked Felix to pose for him (as fun as it might be to picture Felix in modelling mayhem …) but had instead worked from a photograph. Controversially, however, Rob had decided that, in light of her oft-confused gender and her Yorkshire roots, he wanted to paint her wearing a dress – a green-with-red-bow dress, which was actually modelled upon one worn by the famous Yorkshire novelist Charlotte Brontë, whose bicentenary of birth was celebrated in 2016.

Well, from the moment it had been unveiled by the deputy mayor, the picture had certainly provided a talking point! Straight away, people wanted selfies taken with it; and if Felix’s fans ever failed to find their flesh-and-blood idol while on a visit, they at least now had her portrait to gaze upon instead. It wasn’t unusual to see people stopping in their tracks on their way into or out of the station, doing a double take as they first caught sight of the artwork and then paused to drink it in. Folk gazed up at it thoughtfully, much as art aficionados muse upon the work of an old master. Rob’s desire to paint a proper portrait of Felix had real impact; it would not have looked out of place on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, hanging alongside esteemed portraits of the kings and queens of England. For Queen Felix, of course, that was perfectly apt.

From her perch amid the Christmas tree, Felix couldn’t actually see her portrait – but she could see the queue of customers at the busy booking office. Maybe she watched with some amusement – certainly, superiority – as they unwittingly passed her by. Little did they know that the famous station cat was lurking overhead, sitting partway up in the fairy-lit tree. Only those with their eyes peeled like Christmas Day spuds spotted that amid the twinkling lights was a pair of emerald eyes shining brightly alongside them.

But, once she was spotted, the secret was soon shared among the passengers queuing to buy tickets below.

‘Look! She’s in the Christmas tree!’ someone might gasp in delight, as they suddenly caught sight of the secretive spy cat.

Those same words would echo down the line, like a festive feline version of Chinese whispers.

‘She’s in the tree …’

‘She’s hiding, look.’

‘Oh, look, how sweet is she?’

The answer, of course, was very. So much so that in December – in light of Felix’s stellar achievements and rising fame – TPE decided to release a limited-edition Felix-focused calendar. Featuring twelve adorable pictures of the station cat, it included images of Felix as a kitten, on patrol and playing in a cardboard box. It even included the snapshot that had launched her to global fame: Felix in her yellow hi-vis vest with her senior pest controller badge proudly on display. December’s image, of course, was Felix in a Santa hat – even if, due to her diva demands, she wasn’t so much wearing it as momentarily consenting to have it draped upon her. The company planned to sell the calendars online, with all proceeds going to the Huddersfield Samaritans.

Felix’s calendar was released for sale on 7 December 2016 – and very quickly caused chaos, much as the cat herself could do when left alone with a packet of Dreamies. Though TPE, sensibly, had chosen to retail the calendars on a bespoke website (and not the one they sold their train tickets through), not five minutes after the calendars had gone on sale, the website crashed. Thousands of people were clamouring for a calendar! They wanted a little bit of Felix magic every day of the coming year and this was the perfect way to secure it.

Jack Kempf, who worked in communications at head office, had taken responsibility for the calendars. He somehow managed to get the website back up – only for the first thousand calendars he had printed to sell out instantly. He organised a second printing, but again the website crashed – and, in the end, TPE had to get a whole new server just to manage the demand! Within eighteen hours, every single calendar had gone.

In less than a day, Felix had raised a staggering £18,000 for the Samaritans. It made a huge difference to the charity. The Huddersfield Samaritans office was located down a dark, quiet street. With the counselling service being run 24/7, volunteers sometimes felt unsafe arriving or leaving in the middle of the night. Thanks to Felix, they were able to add new lighting and CCTV to help with security, so that the people giving up their time to help others could feel protected.

There was also enough money to change the signage on the building, which had previously been so old that it hadn’t even had the phone number on it – quite an important thing for the Samaritans to promote. Finally, Felix’s fans had given so generously that the charity was also able to refurbish its waiting room. It meant that people who came to them in person had a warm, safe and clean space to wait until a counsellor became available. It made a real difference to people’s lives. And it was all thanks to Felix. What a special cat she was.

One little girl in particular was about to discover that for herself. Towards the tail end of 2016, just before Christmas, Eva came through the station one day with her mum, Helen. Eva had blonde hair with a curl to it and enormous big blue eyes, which were framed by huge pink glasses. She was dressed in a deep-blue coat that was covered in stars. Judging by the irrepressible energy she had, which bubbled within her like the burble of a brook in a summer meadow, she was something of a star herself.

‘Look, Mummy, look!’ she called as she and Helen entered the station to catch a train. They came through Huddersfield station regularly – once or twice a week – on their way to visit Helen’s parents in Shepley. But on all their previous visits, three-year-old Eva had never before noticed the exciting thing she was now pointing at.

Helen’s eyes followed her little girl’s finger … and then she started giggling too. Eva had spotted the station’s cat flap, with its friendly-looking cartoon cat and those five letters spelling out ‘Felix’.

‘Who’s Felix, Mummy?’ Eva asked eagerly, once Helen had told her what the letters said.

‘Felix is the station’s cat,’ Helen explained. She had heard that Huddersfield had one, though she had never seen her.

Eva’s little mouth circled to an ‘o’ of wonder. The idea that there was a railway cat was so marvellous that she was momentarily struck dumb – but it lasted only a beat before she started excitedly asking questions. ‘How come the station has a cat, Mummy? Does she go on the trains like us? Do you think she goes exploring? How brilliant is it that she’s got her own way through to get on the trains, Mummy? Do you think she is having an adventure right now?’

Eva’s questions lasted all the way through the gateline, on to the train to Shepley and all the way to Grandma’s house. Helen, quickly researching online to find the answers to her little girl’s barrage of questions, soon found Felix’s Facebook page. She excitedly showed it to Eva. After that, every day, they looked online to see what Felix was up to. Doing so soon became the highlight of their day.

Eva was a very imaginative little girl. In her mind, Felix had more adventures than even the Facebook page showed. She had a fairy tale in her head that the station cat went on escapades all across the country, every day leaping on to a different train and going off to see the world. (In fact, since arriving at Huddersfield as a kitten on the Penistone line, Felix had never once stepped foot on a service.) Eva’s passion was art and it wasn’t long before she was regularly drawing pictures of a fluffy black-and-white cat called Felix. She would stick her artworks up on the fridge when she was done and then chatter away to her brand-new friend.

Helen encouraged her to paint Felix as much as she could. It was good for Eva – but not only because it’s good for all children to be artistic and express themselves. It was good for Eva in particular because Eva needed all the help she could get to try to improve her poor eyesight. When she drew or painted or crafted, as she loved to, she had to use her failing vision, and Helen hoped that her sketching might just strengthen it, as the doctors said it might.

It had been the year before, when Eva was only two, that they’d first identified a problem. It was Helen’s dad, Grandad Peter, who had realised that their beloved girl’s left eye was slowly turning inwards. They’d taken her to the opticians, who’d quickly realised her vision was poor in both eyes, and glasses had been prescribed. The first time Eva put them on, she’d exclaimed in delight, ‘Mummy! Wow! I can see!’ It broke Helen’s heart to think about how Eva must have struggled before then.

But the glasses were failing to rectify the sight in her very bad, turning-in left eye. Recently, the eye specialists at the hospital had said that Eva must now wear an eyepatch for four hours a day at home, over her good eye, to try to strengthen the sight in the bad. Helen and Eva had picked out a pretty fabric patch – pink with white hearts – which went over her head and glasses. Now, when Eva sat at the kitchen table at home and drew her pictures of Felix, she always did it with her patch on, trying to focus through her bad eye as she brought her vision of Felix to the page.

‘Mummy, do you think we can meet Felix one day?’ Eva asked breathlessly the December they’d first discovered her.

‘Well, we can try,’ Helen told her brightly.

So they had gone to the station, but there had been no sign of Felix. When they asked the platform staff for help, they were simply told that she wasn’t about.

Eva’s shoulders had slumped with sadness.

‘We can try again,’ Helen told her.

But, dejected, Eva had gone home disappointed. And perhaps she looked at the night sky that winter, that sky that matched her starry coat, and sent a wish to meet Felix winding upwards. Perhaps it soared to the sky and lodged in a cloud … but there it stayed.

It wasn’t yet time for that Christmas wish to come true.