Full Steam Ahead, Felix

2. A Rosemary by Any Other Name

Felix’s head jerked sharply to the right. Something had caught her attention: something very, very interesting indeed. Out on the platforms, she leant forward, her head and neck outstretched, her eyes fixed and unblinking, the better to see. She inched further forward and peered in the direction of the King’s Head pub at the southern end of platform one. Then she was suddenly up on her feet and trotting fast on a mission of discovery.

Rumble, rumble, rumble! went the sound that had caught her attention. Rumble, rumble, rumble! As she neared the source of the sound, she was excited to see that it was being caused by some people dressed in yellow hi-vis jackets – the costume that her beloved TPE colleagues always wore when they were out on the platforms. With increasing enthusiasm, she bounded up to them and cast her eyes skywards, expecting to see one of her favourites looking back. When, instead, a young man with strawberry-blond hair greeted her expectant eyes, she stopped running abruptly – and with rather cutting disappointment. Oh, her sudden halt seemed to say, you’re not the one I want.

The young man was called Adam Taylor. Just as Felix had identified in her clever little way, he was not a member of the TPE team. In fact, Adam was a volunteer with the Friends of Huddersfield Station, a volunteer group who staffed the local information desk on the concourse and who also took responsibility for maintaining the many plants that were dotted about the platforms in blue pots. Adam and his fellow volunteers had to don the yellow jackets whenever they gardened on the platforms – thus accounting for the very confused look that now crossed the little cat’s face.

Despite Felix’s evident disappointment, however, she certainly hadn’t lost her curiosity in what Adam was up to. As he turned and walked away from her, that intriguing rumble rumble rumble sound started up again. Felix prowled after him enquiringly, her head on one side, assessing the situation.

Aha! She had it. Adam and his fellow volunteers were dragging a large blue-and-white water butt with them as they trudged round the pots to water them, and its black wheels – which could pull up to 80 litres of water – were making a right racket on the concrete platforms. Every now and then, Adam would bend down to the bottom of it, where a little tap projected, and fill up his bright red watering can.

He was very new to gardening on the station, having only volunteered for that aspect of the job in May 2016, but he’d been volunteering with the Friends since the year before, starting in March. It had literally been a lifeline for him. About eight years prior, at the age of nineteen, he had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). A daunting diagnosis for such a young man, it had left him with paralysing depression and anxiety. Fearing for the future, struck low by the physical impairments that limited his hopes, he found he soon retreated from the world, sitting at home for days on end with the lights off and the curtains drawn. His condition left him unable to work, but also seemingly unable to communicate with others. He shut down, barely speaking to anyone unless it was an online interaction on a computer. Yet he found that the longer he stayed at home, the more and more depressed he became – even suicidally so on a few occasions. But it was thanks to Pathways, a mental-health team based in Mirfield, that he started to get his life back.

He was assigned a really caring gentleman as a mentor, who slowly reintroduced Adam to the idea of leaving the flat for more than just necessity and who helped him to rebuild his confidence. After nearly a year of working with him, Adam began looking for jobs, although he knew that his condition meant his options were restricted as he was unable to work full-time or to do roles that were physically taxing. But the Job Centre, upon learning that he loved transport, had soon put him in contact with the Friends, who were always looking for more volunteers to help care for the station. Adam had signed up immediately and simply turning up to the station every Friday morning, helping others and being part of something, had really helped him feel that he did have some worth in the greater world, after all.

Recently, one of the long-term volunteers had announced that she’d like to step back from gardening duties, as it was beginning to get difficult for her to kneel down to do the pots. Adam had debated long and hard about whether he should step up. His MS meant he couldn’t walk long distances without extreme levels of pain, and the platforms on the station, when walked from end to end, are, in fact, a surprisingly long distance. The MS also affected his sense of touch; he almost had to work out anew each morning how much pressure to apply when using his hands and feet. Was gardening something that would help or handicap him further?

But Adam had loved his time volunteering at the station so far and he’d wanted to do more. He had a bit of a green finger with plants at home – perhaps that would translate to the larger canvas of the platform pots? His doctors had also told him that he had to be very careful that his muscles didn’t waste away, and Adam hoped the gardening might help to strengthen them. Apprehensively, he put himself forward and joined the small team who maintained the station’s plants.

It was tough to begin with. The plants were watered every week. At first, Adam struggled, but in time it became less effort and he found, if he took some specially prescribed medication beforehand, that he could do it all without too much pain. And, of course, having the companionship of a little black-and-white cat, as he sometimes did, also made the hours fly by.

Adam had first met Felix the year before, when she was wandering around on the concourse and he was manning the local information stand. She had come straight up to him and he had given her a few pets.

He soon found that her approach was not a one-off. When Adam had first started volunteering, his mental-health problems were still a powerful influence and, even though he was enjoying his time at the station, self-doubt and anxiety gnawed away at him. Sometimes he would take himself away to sit quietly on a bench at the station, unwelcome thoughts whirring every which way in his head.

Felix used to come up to him and nuzzle him. It was in no way a demand for attention, such as she would insist on, diva-like, with Angie Hunte. Instead, she was there for Adam, and he found that, as he stroked along her black back, he suddenly felt happy again. Cats had always had that effect on him. His grandmother – with whom he’d lived for many years – had two, Jet and Mitty, who were black and tortoiseshell moggies respectively. Playful and full of life, they had always lifted his spirits – and he now found Felix was intent on doing the same.

The more time he spent at the station, the more he realised that it wasn’t just him that Felix was helping. As he observed her going about her business, he noticed that Felix often sat next to the person on the platform who looked as though they needed cheering up the most. One morning, he observed her with a middle-aged man. The gentleman was looking very downcast, just staring at the floor, so caught up in his dark thoughts that he had completely failed to notice the fluffy black-and-white cat who was watching him so intently. Felix had definitely noticed him. Gently, she went up to him and nuzzled his knees, before leaping on to the metal bench beside him and settling down for a cuddle. The chap instantly perked up.

People wrote to tell the station staff how Felix had helped them on difficult journeys – on their way to say goodbye to a terminally ill relative, for example, or when they had to go to work the morning after that relative had died. ‘It was very difficult going to work this morning,’ confided John Rooney in one such letter. ‘My grandad had died in the early hours. I was waiting on the platform and Felix came up to me and rubbed her head on my knee and let me stroke her. She made me feel so much better and it was as if she could sense my grief. Please give her a Dreamie or two from me.’

With Felix being such a special cat with such very special skills, Adam felt lucky indeed that, on this summer’s day in 2016, Felix had chosen to accompany him on his watering duties. Together, they trotted along the platform and Adam carefully attended to each plant. Thanks to Felix’s friendship with Billy Bolt, and the hours she had spent beside him as he planted the station garden, the cat perhaps felt she was something of an expert gardener. At the least, she surely had the feline arrogance that she always knew best – so she probably wasn’t expecting to learn anything from this little outing with Adam.

Oh, how wrong she was.

When she was ‘helping’ with the watering, Felix tended to stand by the side of the pots, like an independent inspector. She would look from the plants to the purple-shirted volunteers, occasionally cracking out a right scowl if she felt their work was not up to scratch. As the resident station cat, she seemed to feel a protective responsibility for the platform plants. ‘These are mine – don’t damage them,’ her flashing eyes seemed to signal dangerously.

On one or two of the pots, however – the larger size with more generous rims – Felix had sometimes made it a habit to jump up on to the edge. There she would balance nimbly, casting a closer eye on proceedings and occasionally having an enthusiastic nosy through the begonias.

On this particular day, Felix made just such a leap. Whether she mistimed it or intended to experience the soft landing of the soil, Adam did not know and Felix wasn’t telling, but she ended up sprawled in a patch of rosemary – and her disturbance of the plant released its distinctive smell.

Well, it was distinctive to Adam, who knew exactly what it was, but Felix seemed not to know quite what had hit her. Her green eyes went very wide, as if it was a shocking new scent. She blinked in confusion, seeming to have no idea where it was coming from. Curious now, she continued to rustle the green-spiked plant, causing its leaves to release yet more fragrance. Well, at that stage she looked round rather fiercely, as though the smell had offended her, and ducked her head once more beneath its stems while twitching her nose furiously.

As she had beaten Adam to the pot, he had not yet attended to it, so the plant was untrimmed, with several dangling branches waggling about, which now teased Felix further still. With increasing urgency, she batted at those low-hanging branches, as a detective might do when hunting through the undergrowth for clues. The smell was really rather powerful – Adam was six foot tall and even he could smell it as it wafted out all across the station!

Felix appeared utterly transfixed by it, pulling some incredibly perplexed expressions on her bewhiskered face that were truly funny to observe. What was this maddening smell? Eventually, she figured out where it was coming from – but only after she had interrogated that rosemary plant as only she knew how: by batting it, swiping it, and rolling around as close as she could to it without falling out of the pot! It became pretty precarious, but she seemed to prioritise wrangling with the rosemary over any sense of decorum.

Once she had successfully identified the smell’s source, however, it soon became clear that she was not a fan. Curiosity may not have killed the cat, but it had certainly left her with an unpleasant tingle in her nostrils. With a final haughty shake of her regal head, she leapt down as quickly as she could and stalked off down the platform, without a backward glance at Adam or the plant that had so offended her.

Despite Felix’s rejection of it, the rosemary remained at the station. Every now and again, Felix would pass it on her patrols, but Adam never once saw her jump on to that plant again. It seemed she had decided that particular adventure was not one she cared to repeat.

Ah well, Felix – better luck next thyme.