Full Steam Ahead, Felix

14. Mystic Mog

Angela spoke gently to her. ‘There’s nowt wrong with our Felix,’ she said. ‘She’s still around, I promise you. She’s not dead.’

The woman blinked in shock, salty tears still caught in her lashes. She placed a hand on her chest, as though feeling for her broken heart that was now slowly being mended. ‘Oh, thank God for that,’ she said, with feeling. ‘But – but what’s all this, then? I really thought she’d gone.’

Angela looked to where the lady was pointing, at the giveaway table. She saw the sombre black pawprints leading up to the table. She saw the royal purple cloth covered over with its mournful black neighbour. She saw the huge picture of Felix behind the table … and then she saw the big black suggestion box slap bang in the middle of this ‘shrine’.

‘I thought her ashes were in that box,’ explained the lady.

Well, on reflection, you could see why. If you didn’t know about the giveaway, it did rather look as though the station cat was formally lying in state …

‘Oh, no, no, no!’ Angela reassured her. They both started to giggle at the mix-up. ‘We were just doing an event for her, that’s all. This was all left over from yesterday. Felix is alive, I promise you!’

‘Thank goodness for that!’ the woman exclaimed, and her face was suddenly sunny again.

For Angela, the woman’s heartfelt emotion was yet another example of how deeply Felix’s fans cared for her. As the summer drew on, Angela felt a continued connection to them, and a continued desire to do more to help. Though the Felix postcards they’d made for the gift bags had originally been intended just for the giveaway day, Angela now suggested that they become a permanent feature at the station. All the team members felt bad if people called for Felix when she wasn’t available, but Angela hit on the idea of giving them a postcard of her instead. She printed a series of them, all featuring stunning black-and-white shots of the black-and-white cat, with slogans such as ‘Sorry I missed you’ printed on them. Angie Hunte joined in as well, arranging for Felix pens and pencils to be made. ‘I’ve borrowed the senior pest controller’s pen!’ ran the slogan on the biros, which also featured Felix’s fluffy face. It made the team so happy to be able to give visitors something, even if it wasn’t time with Felix herself.

Angela wondered what more she could do as Felix’s lady-in-waiting. Working in the office one day, her eye fell on yet another delivery that had arrived for Felix. Though Angela had taken charge of Felix’s birthday gifts and charity donations, no one really had responsibility for all the post that she received. And people didn’t just send packets of Dreamies or cat food, which were easily donated to a cat charity if Felix couldn’t use them – they sent expressions of love, such as hand-drawn pictures, handmade quilts featuring Felix’s face, and even hand-knitted pigeons to represent her long-time foe Percy. People spent hours, if not weeks or months, crafting things for her, and it didn’t seem right to Angela that they largely languished forgotten at the station, perhaps eventually to be thrown away in a clear-out and dismissed as clutter. She felt someone should be caring for this growing collection of memorabilia. They did not have enough space in the booking office to display it all, as new things arrived almost every day, so only a very few items could ever end up in there; in truth, the room was already full to bursting.

So, that summer, Angela started taking the artworks home. She hoped one day that there might be a display she could create somewhere at the station in Felix’s honour to commemorate all these bits and pieces. Until then, Angela packaged up the knitted items with love and securely transported them home.

That August, she surveyed her house, wondering where on earth she could keep it all so that her own home did not become cluttered. Then she had an idea. Arms fully laden, she climbed the stairs and pulled open the doors of the wardrobe in her bedroom. There was an empty drawer in there, she knew, where her ex-husband had once kept his shirts.

Well, he won’t be needing this drawer any more! Angela thought and carefully laid the Felix-inspired artworks inside it. For decades, she had bent to place her husband’s shirts inside that drawer, but its contents were rather different now. Yet Angela smiled as she shut the drawer, feeling a satisfying sense of purpose. It felt good to have that drawer in use again, with something new to occupy all the space that had been left behind.

Back at the station, Angela wanted to thank Felix for the way she was helping her to forge a new, independent life. So she bought her a special present that August: a fluffy white sheepskin-style radiator bed. It would hook over the radiator in the ladies’ locker room and provide Felix with a toasty-warm snug to retreat to when she wasn’t out working or meeting fans. Though she’d been given special blankets and baskets before, she had never really taken to them. Angela hoped that, for the first time, Felix might finally like to have a proper bed of her own.

The signs weren’t promising at first. For about a week, ungrateful Felix merely assessed the new arrival from a distance, as though weighing up both what it was and whether it was friend or foe. The radiator bed was a little like a hammock that hung halfway down its heated wall: Felix would have to jump up to it from the floor, but once she was in situ it would give her an elevated, comfy throne from which to survey the world.

First, she had to get up there. For a while, it seemed as though it was a leap too far. She blinked her big green eyes at it instead. When she finally did try it, the bed wobbled on its metal hooks, so that she jumped back off it straight away, the powerful push of her hind legs saying in no uncertain terms, ‘Oh no, I’m not keen on that …’

After a few weeks of this, however, Angela and her colleagues started to notice that Felix was spending an awful lot of time in her new hangout in the ladies’ locker room. Now, when she leapt up on to the soft surface of the bed, she padded about on it happily, as though pressing the covers down – much as we might plump our pillows before settling down to sleep. She became so comfortable in it, in fact, that she would frequently lie with her limbs hanging right over the edges, splayed out in such a luxuriating stretch that her colleagues would yawn just to look at her, her evident comfort making them crave their own warm beds. If the ladies happened to be in the anteroom of the locker room, with Felix snuggled up next door, they noticed that she purred even when no one was in the room with her, taking audible pleasure from her comfortable spot beside the radiator. Now, if her colleagues had to go into the room while she was sleeping, they would tiptoe round her and turn the lights off as they left. It became a quiet and peaceful spot for the station cat, so different from all the noise on the platforms outside. Only a faint thrum of air conditioning – and a cat’s contented purr – could be heard as Felix snuggled down to sleep. She looked utterly blissful blissed out in her bed. Before too long, her radiator bed became the first place that anyone looked for her whenever fans came calling. So that was where Andy Croughan found her that summer, as he came to ask her a very important football-related favour …

Earlier that year, on 29 May 2017, Huddersfield Town AFC had hit the headlines when they’d been promoted to the top tier of English football for the first time since 1972. It was an extraordinary day; half the station had headed down to Wembley for the play-offs and come cheering back again on the train – this time, as supporters of a Premier League side! Jean Randall in the booking office brought in a special blue-and-white Huddersfield Town scarf to hang up in the office to celebrate the lads’ win – and Felix, agreeably, posed for pictures in it, wanting to do her bit for her local team. She frequently posted on Facebook during the football season, ‘Congratulations to Mr Wagner [the manager] and the boys!’ and across the whole of Huddersfield everyone was excited about their glorious achievement in getting to the uppermost league in English football.

Everywhere you looked, in fact, you could tell that the promotion was big news for the Yorkshire town – even Leo the Lion, the statue on the Lion Building outside in St George’s Square, had got in on the act, having his own Huddersfield Town scarf draped round him and their blue-and-white flag flying behind him too. The council, meanwhile, decorated all the lamp posts in the square with metallic banners that tinkled in the wind, each emblazoned with the slogan ‘Premier for Business’ to encourage investment.

That August, the new football season was about to begin – and Felix was called upon to cast her judgement on the team’s chances in the most competitive league in the world. Pre-season, Huddersfield Town – who were nicknamed the Terriers – were sadly favourites for relegation but Felix, as it turned out, had a little more faith in them than that.

Working in conjunction with the local paper, the Huddersfield Examiner, Felix was asked by Andy Croughan if she would predict for the lads whether they would win, lose or draw their first three games in football’s top flight. Yet Felix was not expected to use a crystal ball or a set of tarot cards to make her predictions – she would be working with her favourite medium of all: food.

Out on platform one, Andy set up three dinner bowls: one marked with the logo of Huddersfield Town, one with that of their opponent, and another marked with the word ‘DRAW’. She could eat from only one. All Felix had to do was choose which bowl to eat from – and that would be her prediction for the result of the game. Between her tiny cat-toothed jaws, she held the fate of the newly minted Premier League side.

Andy watched nervously as Felix trotted up to the bowls for her first prediction. It was a toughie: Huddersfield were set to play Crystal Palace away at Selhurst Park. Felix seemed to sense the controversy; though she sniffed first at the Huddersfield Town bowl, lingering over its tempting scents, she later moved on to the Draw bowl without taking a bite from the local team’s dish. Had the boys really lost her support so soon?

Once at the Draw bowl, she again lowered her head thoughtfully above it. She sniffed eagerly, assessing the aromas like an expert sommelier as she deliberated her difficult choice. But then, to the delight of Terriers’ fans everywhere, she returned to the Huddersfield Town bowl – and chomped down hungrily on the food set out for her! Felix was backing the boys to win!

In fact, she did the same again for the other two games; on those occasions not even hesitating before heading straight for the Huddersfield Town selection. The bookies had the odds of three wins in a row at forty-one to one, but Felix defied those odds with her choices.

The cat’s mystical abilities were immediately called into question by so-called expert football pundits, who unashamedly scoffed at her insights. Jack Kempf was invited on to the Hawksbee and Jacobs show on TalkSport Radio to discuss Felix’s predictions. After dissing Felix by initially getting her gender wrong, the presenter added rather dismissively, ‘I think Felix has gone mad! She is being over-optimistic there …’

But, as the season began on 12 August 2017, it was Felix who had the last laugh. Against all expectations, on the first day of the season, the Terriers thumped Palace three–nil.

Seven days later, the team took to the field again, this time playing Newcastle at home. Once again, the Terriers triumphed, beating the Magpies one–nil.

They may have been pre-season favourites for the drop, but Huddersfield were now sitting pretty in the table in second place. Their impressive start had bowled everyone over – everyone, of course, except for Felix the cat.

‘Mystic Mog’ herself took the resultant flurry of media interest in her second-sight skills entirely in her stride, looking impassively at the sports journalists who now flocked to meet her. Such a laid-back stance was increasingly becoming Felix’s default position. After her wobble in June, when she’d tried to ‘attack’ Jeff Stelling (as the Huddersfield Examiner dramatically put it), she seemed to be slowly becoming more and more tolerant of both fans and cameras.

It could be seen in her interactions with the travelling football fans. Many Huddersfield Town supporters regularly journeyed through the station on their way to and from games, and they now made a habit of coming over to their good-luck charm to give her a fuss. Sometimes fans would have a drink inside them and be a bit lairy, but rather than being frightened of them, Felix instead seemed to act as a calming influence. It wasn’t unusual to spot a group of lads in their football shirts hunkered down on the ground beside her, stealing a shot or two of the famous station cat on their smartphones. And their loud cheering would diminish to a burble of baby talk as they greeted the cat affectionately. Their big, dominant gestures soon subsided into gentle, sensitive strokes of her fluffy black fur. It really was quite something to behold.

Of course, nothing in life lasts forever – and sadly Felix’s winning streak came to an end on the Terriers’ third game, when they drew against Southampton in a nil–nil draw at home. Mystic Mog hadn’t seen that coming.

Coming to an end, too, was former announcer Chris Bamford’s time at the station; he was soon to move on to his dream job within the company as a train driver, with his end date set for October 2017. Though he’d be passing through Huddersfield at least twice a day in his new role, as he’d be working on the line that ran from Liverpool to York, he knew he wouldn’t be hanging out with Felix any more. The best he could hope for was that he might sometimes glimpse her sitting by her favourite bike racks as he drove through the station. It was a rather sad thought. He really had loved working with the little cat.

So it was the end of an era for both Chris and Mystic Mog. It was a shame, in a way, as everyone at the station would have liked some warning as to what would happen next. For dark times lay ahead for the Huddersfield station team – and they were dark times that no one, not even Felix, could ever have predicted.