Кейт Мур - Full Steam Ahead, Felix

One evening, Dale Woodward watched her as she pottered around on platform one. It was about teatime and a young lad soon came sauntering along the platform with his takeaway tea in a brown paper bag. He took a seat on a metal bench while he waited for his train. He happened to be close to Felix.

Felix, in fact, had spotted him the very moment he’d appeared on the platform. Now that he’d chosen his spot to sit, she crept closer and closer to him. She’d been around the block enough times by now to know what was in that brown paper bag: McDonald’s. Felix was a fan of McDonald’s. So she watched him with an unblinking stare. She licked her lips and inched even closer to the unsuspecting lad.

Focused on his tea and his grumbling belly, the man opened up the carton that he’d taken from within the bag. It held a sweet-smelling burger. Cheese oozed out of its side, its juicy meat patty squished into a fluffy burger bun. Oh, it smelled good. It looked good. Jaws stretching wide, he chomped down on the burger and savoured his first bite. As he chewed, he used his other hand to start scrolling through his phone. His attention was soon fixed on his social media, while the burger hovered in his free hand, his fingers only loosely securing it.

As though the burger was a pigeon in her sights, Felix dropped low to the ground on her belly and started crawling towards it, commando-style. Once she had slunk surreptitiously up to the bench, she risked a jump up on to it, landing silently on her padded paws. The hungry lad was so engrossed in his phone, he did not even notice her presence. For such a charismatic cat, Felix could be surprisingly stealthy when she wanted to be.

She was now a paw’s stretch away from that sweet-smelling burger. Without missing a beat, without a single hesitation, she swiped it right out of the man’s hand.

‘What on earth …?’ he exclaimed in dismay, as his tea tumbled to the ground. The look on his face was priceless. Felix was already down on the ground, where the chap’s dinner had exploded on to the concrete in a modern artwork of burger, lettuce and bun. Felix was already doing her very best to remove any evidence of the cat burglary.

In fact, Felix was making quite the reputation for herself, as that wasn’t the cat’s only food-related crime. One evening, Angela Dunn came out of the toilet, where she’d been changing for a night out, to find Felix rifling through her locker, which – without thinking – she had left open while she’d nipped into the loo inside the ladies’ locker room for privacy. She had only been absent for four or five minutes. But, in that time, Felix had hopped into the locker, retrieved an unopened bag of Dreamies and completely annihilated the packet in her bid to get the goodies inside. Having clawed all the way along the top of it with her super-sharp nails, she had succeeded in tearing it open and then helped herself. By the time Angela returned, Felix was unashamedly pawing at the packet and expertly scooping out yet more treats.

‘Felix!’ Angela admonished. ‘That’s naughty!’

But Felix’s only response was to purr just that little bit louder, even though she was already at top volume. Her gluttony pushed her volume right up to eleven, as a deep, throaty and very satisfied purr echoed around the locker room.

When Angela took the bag off her, Felix still had the temerity to look unashamed. She sat down on her bottom and looked up expectantly. ‘OK,’ her happy green eyes seemed to say, ‘you can feed them to me now. Good idea! That’s much better than me having to do it for myself.’

Angela posted about that particular incident on Felix’s Facebook page, along with a short video of the cat caught in the act. ‘Angela, just accept it,’ she captioned it. ‘This is what happens when you leave your locker open!’ Ooh, she was a monkey.

The staff doubled down on their efforts to restrict her diet – but they found that Felix outwitted them time and time again. The station was a busy place and there was always food about. People dropped things and unhelpfully left them where they fell. One evening, Dale came across a good chunk of chips that had been carelessly dumped by the front door of the station. It was evidently a trip hazard so he hurried quickly away and asked the cleaners to come and brush them up.

‘It’s just this way,’ he said, as he ushered his colleague back to the spot.

The cleaner looked at him quizzically. He had his brush and pan in hand, ready to sweep up the chips, but instead of bending to his task he simply looked at Dale, as though worried he’d gone mad. As he glanced down at the empty stretch of station floor, Dale could see why: there was nothing to clear up. Felix had eaten the lot. She sat there licking her lips, looking pleased as punch. ‘What?’ she seemed to be saying as Dale tutted and shook his head at her. ‘I was only helping!’

Frustratingly, this wasn’t the only occasion that the greedy Felix was aided and abetted by passengers. During a security check one morning, Angie Hunte stumbled upon a tin of tuna that had been left out on the floor by the station steps. It had clearly not just dropped from somebody’s shopping bag: the ring pull had been deliberately removed. A very tempting treat indeed for any station cat who happened to be passing … Angie caught that particular ‘gift’ in time, but on other occasions she was too late. Felix was once spotted sat beside an empty Greggs bag licking her lips, which was evidence enough that she had wolfed down whatever had been left inside. On another occasion, the team found a woman feeding her bright orange Wotsits. Wotsits! To a cat! They were gobsmacked.

To Felix, it was all a bit of a game, but the team were worried. Though Felix wasn’t too overweight – and her daily patrols up and down the platforms meant she got a fair amount of exercise – if this continued, they were worried she might get sick. For who knew what she might potentially eat next? In addition, human food is well known to be no good for cats – a cat eating just 25g of cheese is the equivalent of a human eating 3.5 hamburgers. A single Wotsit, meanwhile, is the equivalent of half a chocolate bar. Once again, the team appealed to people to be sensible about feeding Felix …

They could only hope that, this time, they would listen.

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.