Кейт Мур - Full Steam Ahead, Felix

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.

7. Clever Cat

‘Here we are, sweetheart,’ said Jean Randall to Felix on Christmas Eve 2016. ‘Welcome back! Welcome home .’

Felix gingerly stepped out of the carry case into Jean’s kitchen and had a good old sniff at the strange air of a domestic setting. Huddersfield station is staffed 24/7 – but only 363 days of the year; it always shuts on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Of course, the beloved railway cat was never going to be left alone in the dark and cold of the deserted station. So, when the festivities rolled around each year, Felix got to go on her holidays too, staying with a member of the team who had volunteered to take her home. Jean, who worked in the booking office, was this year lucky to be welcoming Felix for the third time.

The cat certainly seemed pretty comfortable as she had a good nosy about the downstairs of Jean’s cosy cottage, which had been built in 1802. There were two rooms on the ground floor for the holiday-happy cat to prowl about: a long kitchen-diner and the living room, which had shiny wooden floorboards and a striking stone fireplace. Two years before, Felix had caused chaos when she’d tried to get up the chimney – Jean had nearly had a heart attack, having to grab the cat’s hind legs to prevent her from getting away – but this year Jean was steps ahead. Forewarned is forearmed and all that! Even before bringing Felix home, she had made sure to stuff the chimney with an old pillow wrapped in a black cotton blouse, wedging it in tightly to make sure there were no gaps.

Felix, however, seemed to remember where she was – for as soon as she was let out of her box, she swiftly left the kitchen and headed straight for the living room, the scene of her erstwhile escape act. She proceeded to sit slap bang in front of the fireplace, looking up thoughtfully.