Кейт Мур - Felix The Railway Cat

She bustled back into the office, really pleased that, at last, Felix had taken her medicine.

‘Well,’ she said complacently to her colleagues. ‘That wasn’t too bad, really, was it? Not too bad at all.’

‘Angie,’ said Dale, slowly.

‘What?’

‘Look down there.’

On the carpeted floor was a little white tablet. Felix had spat it out before she’d made a beeline for the door. And she knew exactly what she’d done so she’d legged it before they could try to make her take it again.

Angie shook her head, nevertheless feeling a grudging admiration for the cat’s antics. Obviously Felix’s recent experiences onstage at the Alhambra had stood her in good stead – for the performance she had just given was truly worthy of an Oscar.

But it left them with a problem: how could they get Felix to take her medicine?

In the end, it was Billy who provided the solution. It turned out that the medicine didn’t come only in tablets: you could get it in the form of drops, too, which you placed at the back of the cat’s neck and then the treatment worked just as well. So it was in Billy’s arms that Felix finally received the protection she needed. He held her steady in his rough, weathered hands, stroking her fur reassuringly as he picked up the bottle and administered the drugs.

‘There you go,’ he said gruffly to her. And Felix was very grateful that he had ensured she never had to take those tablets again.

It marked the start of a softening in the relationship between Billy and Felix. The two seemed to reach a kind of understanding. And in Felix’s occasional grumpiness towards people – which she displayed more and more often, the older she got – one could perhaps see something of the cantankerous nature of Billy: Mr Grumpy himself. The two were kindred spirits. At any rate, he didn’t complain quite so much when she came to his garden anymore.

However, the horticultural experts who lived in Huddersfield might well have argued that perhaps he had never really wanted her to stay away. For amid the lavender and the Shasta daisies, the orange montbretia and the blue geraniums that Billy had planted in his garden, there was also another plant: nepeta, commonly called ‘catmint’. It has silvery-grey leaves and spikes of purple flowers, and gardeners know that cats love to roll in its aromatic leaves.

Perhaps he had planted it there just for Felix.

23. The Battle for Huddersfield Station

‘Eh up, here she comes,’ said Dave Chin with a hearty chuckle, watching an exuberant Felix bounding along the platform towards him in December 2013. Beside him, Chrissie from the booking office was carrying a cardboard box that Felix recognised oh so well: it was full of the Christmas tree decorations. Every year, as soon as that box of decorations came out, Felix came out too. For it meant only one thing: game on. Party time. Let the merrymaking begin …

By now it was a well-established tradition that, every December, Felix ‘helped’ to decorate the Christmas tree that stood in the station concourse. Just as she had done as a kitten, she would dart up the bare trunk, right to the top, then sit there for ages, queen of all she surveyed. Just because she was now an older cat, it didn’t mean she had forgotten how to have fun: when she wanted to be, Felix was still just as playful as she had been when she’d first arrived at the station as a little kitten and had run riot over all and sundry. As the decorating commenced, she would determinedly wage war on the baubles and on the gold cardboard fairy that Dave and Chrissie tried to hang on the tall tree, playing football with the ornaments as she batted them across the ticket hall – to the great amusement of the watching customers. As soon as she saw Dave staggering about the station with the enormous Christmas tree in his arms, she was right there with him, and this year was no different.

Eventually, Felix shook the pine needles from her fur and left the twinkling tree behind. Time for a patrol outside.

She exited through the front doors. Felix perhaps liked the grand wooden doors best of all – though not just because they were the most fitting for Queen Felix’s regal appearances. Although Felix had heaps of character, her stage presence – in the opinion of the automatic doors, at least – wasn’t quite sufficient to trigger their electronic sensors and make them open. If she found herself shut in the ticket hall with her colleagues on the other side of the glass, she would have to wait for a cleaner or a member of the public to assist her. Far easier for Felix was the grand entrance, the central door, through which she could come and go as she pleased.

She trotted out and stood at the top of the steps, sniffing the cold winter air. The station’s façade looked as pretty as a picture: round its stately columns were wound strings of ice-white fairy lights; apt enough for this festive season, though in fact they were there all year round. Above Felix’s head, at the tip of the towering columns, was a traditional triangular gable, and at its centre was an old-fashioned black-and-white clock with Roman numerals. Though Felix couldn’t read the position of the hands, they always indicated the same thing anyway: time for adventure.

She scampered happily down the steps and headed out. Immediately in front of the station steps in St George’s Square, modern fountains burst sporadically from the ground in tall spurts of icy water; at night, they were lit in ever-changing shades of purple, green and blue. Felix, savvy as she was, neatly avoided the fountain holes that could suddenly spring to life with a shock of cold water, and headed off to explore.

Across the square, directly opposite the station, was a building that might just have caught her eye. It was the Grade II-listed Lion Building, and atop its soaring, three-storey silhouette was a life-size statue of the King of the Jungle. Leo stalked the rooftop with his enormous feline paws, looking as predatory and proud as his miniature relative did below, his luscious, moulded mane as regal as Felix’s own unique personality.

The Ashlar sandstone Lion Chambers were built in 1853 – but the incarnation of Leo the Lion that gazed down upon the railway cat that evening was a much more recent model. In the 1970s, after over a century’s accumulation of fractures, the original Coade stone lion was retired from duty and on 13 November 1977 a new, lighter, fibreglass model was installed. He certainly looked imposing as he surveyed his kingdom: at night, he was lit up like a Roman god in the floodlights trained upon his feline form, and he dominated the skyline – just as Felix dominated proceedings down below.

Felix was having a brilliant time at the station that Christmas. With her and Billy now the best of friends, Felix would contentedly potter around him when he was on shift. If he was sitting in the office, she’d sit with him while he did his work; occasionally, Billy would even pick her up and she’d snuggle into his lap. If he went outside, she would go too and twirl in and out between his legs as he worked, wagging her fluffy black tail. He’d look down at her as they were doing security checks, or she might even be allowed to join him while he laboured in the garden, dressed in his overalls, on his day off. ‘Y’alright?’ he’d ask her, with a bit of an unfamiliar twinkle in his eye.

Angie Hunte and Dave Chin watched with a sense of pleasant incredulity as Billy enjoyed a bit of a play and a tumble with the black-and-white cat. Felix, in her own special way, had undeniably brought out the soft side of Mr Grumpy. Even as the duo watched, Billy actually smiled at the little cat – a proper, Yorkshire beam of a smile – and Angie and Dave heard him laugh. Billy was laughing . They weren’t used to that.