Кейт Мур - Felix The Railway Cat

She had an even greater desire to explore.

To begin with, however, her track-crossing adventures were always curtailed at the halfway point. She would get so far, then turn tail and retreat. But Felix’s courage and confidence were building by the day, and soon she felt secure enough in her knowledge of the railway to cross not one but two sets of tracks and make it all the way to Platform 4.

Angie Hunte, watching her little cat making her way in the world, thought that Felix’s new accomplishment in learning how to navigate the tracks safely needed formal recognition. On the railway, employees have to complete what is called a Personal Track Safety (PTS) course before they are allowed to work on the tracks. As walking on the tracks is so dangerous, employees are not allowed to set foot on them until they are in possession of a PTS certificate to show that they have successfully completed their training. They are also issued with a PTS ID card, bearing their photograph; these cards expire every two years.

As it happened, around the same time that Felix completed her own personal track safety ‘exam’ and became adept at crossing the tracks, maintenance man Dave Chin’s latest PTS card expired.

‘Could I have that please, Dave?’ Angie asked him, a smile playing on her lips and a twinkle in her eye as she cooked up a little plot.

‘’Course you can,’ he told her, intrigued.

So Felix was soon the proud bearer of her own, personalised PTS card, granting her the authority to walk on the tracks. Angie carefully stuck a photograph of Felix in the appropriate space on the cream-and-red card, then scribbled on it in a black marker pen: ACCESS TO ALL AREAS.

It was official: Felix had the run of the place, and she had a PTS card to prove it.

20. Queen Felix

The customer came rushing onto the concourse. ‘There’s a cat on the track!’ he exclaimed in horror. ‘She’s going to get run over!’

The team in their hi-vis jackets sighed – not another concerned customer.

‘She’s fine, sir,’ they reassured him. ‘She knows what she’s doing.’

‘But what if a train comes?’

‘Trust us, it’s fine. She’ll get up and walk away.’

Outside, at the centre of all this fuss, was Felix, sitting calmly at the midway point of the tracks while commuters gathered in concern, looking as though she was saying, ‘ What? ’ with a disdainful flicker of her big green eyes. In truth, it had become a bit of a favourite game of hers to saunter out to this centre-stage point, a bit of a wind-up that gave everybody on the platform a good old fright; clever as she was, people never, ever saw her on the tracks when a train was actually due.

Felix herself was no longer frightened of those trains. The kitten who used to run for home whenever they roared into the station now blinked at them nonchalantly. If she was in the middle of a really thorough wash, she might not even look up. The lack of fear didn’t mean that she was less cautious, simply that she felt completely confident in her skill and in her knowledge of the station.

That knowledge grew wider day by day. With her access-all-areas pass, Felix’s horizons expanded. She started coming back to the station with brambles and bushy bits in her fur – clear evidence that her explorations were taking her further afield. Even on the station itself, she would strut about authoritatively, strolling along the front entrance as if she owned the place – and what a place it was.

The façade of Huddersfield station, rather aptly for such an elegant cat as Felix, is a grand classical portico with majestic pillars; its design was based on the palazzi of Renaissance Italy. The poet John Betjeman once said it had the finest façade of any such building in the country – and English Heritage agreed, selecting it as one of its top ten favourite stations in England. An architectural journalist, meanwhile, thought it so magnificent that he described the station as ‘a kind of stately home with trains in’. It has to be said: it suited Felix down to the ground. And at 416 feet in length, such a stunning façade provided quite a catwalk for the railway cat.

It was almost as if Felix knew she fitted the part. Drawing on her stately surroundings and her new-found confidence and maturity, Felix’s gait now took on an unmistakeably regal air. When she strolled or even simply sat down, her striking head would be held high, as though she were looking down upon her subjects; her imperial procession through the concourse announcing, ‘I’m ready for my public … I’m making my entrance now.’

Something in the proud way Felix carried herself reminded Angie Hunte of royalty. It is indeed apt that female cats are called ‘queens’, for Felix was most definitely cut from royal cloth. So emphatic was the imperial impression she gave that Angie now nicknamed her ‘Her Majesty’.

And, as befits a monarch, Felix made sure that she chose only the best spots on the station for her latest adventures. Beyond the car park and the King’s Head was a somewhat unkempt, overgrown area that lay beyond the white picket fence of the station’s boundary. Filled with long grass and wildflowers, this became her ‘country retreat’, where she could play among the sweet-smelling grass and rub her back along the plants. Inside the station, as the summer of 2013 drew on, she asserted her ownership of the place by taking up residence on the concourse, where the large windows created glorious sunbathing spots on the white tiled floor. The sun would stream through the windows in shafts of light, creating spot-lit patches in which Felix could indulge in a luxurious catnap.

And those catnaps wouldn’t be quick. Felix would bask in the warmth of the summer sun for hours on end. She didn’t care that she might be spread-eagled in the middle of the queue for the ticket office: this was her kingdom and she wasn’t moving for anybody. Her subjects should circle around her, like the planets do the sun – she was as immovable as a star. If someone addressed her, perhaps asking her to shift so they could move forward, she would look up at them with a supercilious scowl, but she would not move, and in the end they would simply step over her and carry on.

By far Felix’s favourite spot on the station, however, now that she had mastered the art of crossing the tracks, was Billy’s garden.

Billy’s garden was the station garden: another of his inspirational ideas to create something a little bit different for everyone who used the station and for the local community.

For years, there had been a patch of near-jungle located just back from Platform 4 – it was formerly Platform 7, but it had been taken out of use years before, allowing ugly weeds and gnarled trees to take over. Whenever he passed it Billy had used to mutter what an ‘absolute waste of growth’ it was.

‘It needs chopping down and then you could have a lovely garden,’ he would say, moaning about how dreadful it was that something wasn’t being done to improve it.

Well, as was Billy’s way, he had moaned and moaned and moaned – and eventually, after years of complaining in the right managers’ ears, he had got a green light to do something about it at last. He had even roped those managers – and the British Transport Police – into his vision. ‘You lot can come down and help,’ he’d told them bluntly, and there had been a weekend when the station was alive with the puffs and pants of Billy’s assembled motley crew as they tore apart the thick undergrowth with secateurs and chopped down the tangled trees.

That clearance had taken place when Gareth Hope still worked at the station. But getting rid of the bulk of the jungle had only been the first step – Billy then had to put in hours and hours and hours of work to clear it all, enhance the soil and pull out all the knotted roots, and eventually choose new plants and nurture them. The garden was Billy’s passion and he was the only one who worked on it, so it had been years in the making. Billy gave it what time he could, and even did a bit of maintenance and horticultural work while he was on duty, if it was a quiet shift. Yet there were many times when the team at the station would see him over there on his day off, dressed in his overalls and digging away with his own tools, one of his cigarillos clutched in his hand whenever he took a break. In Billy’s opinion, if you were going to do something, it was worth doing properly. Within that gruff exterior beat a heart of gold. Billy cared – and every green shoot that flourished in that garden was proof of it.