Кейт Мур - Felix The Railway Cat

Transpennine Express

and

Kate Moore

FELIX THE RAILWAY CAT

Contents

Introduction

1. A Madcap Idea

2. A ‘Mouse’ in the House

3. A Star Is Born

4. Welcome to Huddersfield

5. First Day on the Job

6. What’s in a Name?

7. Felix Works His Magic

8. New Discoveries

9. Brave New World

10. Doctor’s Orders

11. Learning the Ropes

12. A Very Special Cat

13. Missing

14. Angel Felix?

15. The First Farewell

16. On the Night Shift

17. The Pest Controller

18. Stranger Danger

19. The Final Hurdle

20. Queen Felix

21. Curtain Up

22. It Must Be Love

23. The Battle for Huddersfield Station

24. Clever Felix

25. Meet the Boss

26. Santa Claws

27. The Hardest Goodbye

28. A Helping Hand

29. Felix the Facebooker

30. One Night in January

31. Felix Is Famous

32. Back to Work

Epilogue

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

Introduction

If you go down to Huddersfield station in Yorkshire, you may be in for a big surprise … For greeting you at the ‘Customer Information and Assistance’ point, waiting patiently to attend to customer enquiries, might not be a bright young woman or a helpful old man dressed in the purple-and-navy uniform of TransPennine Express.

Instead, the team member on duty may be Felix, the Huddersfield station cat.

She sits proudly at the desk, her ears attuned to the familiar cacophony of station sounds, her green eyes alert and intelligent as you approach. Her fluffy black tail – tipped with a dash of white – flicks back and forth rhythmically, almost wagging, as though she is delighted to see you.

But Felix is a working pest controller, not a house cat, and years of being patted and prodded by customers have made her, at times, wary of strangers. Yet when she knows you, whether you’re a colleague or a commuter, her affection knows no bounds.

With a single, graceful leap, she dives from the desk to the floor and winds her way around your legs, her long white whiskers twitching as she investigates the possibility of you being in possession of a treat. Felix lives for treats and, despite her initial grumpiness, the most unfamiliar of strangers can soon become a lifelong friend in the right circumstances.

Yet a cat cannot live on treats alone; and for Felix adventure gives just as much sustenance. So although Felix can be found most days at the station – on duty at her desk, patrolling the platforms, or helping to check tickets at the gateline – she also explores far beyond the station’s borders. Watch her as she goes: passing the bronze statue in St George’s Square outside with a friendly flick of her swishing tail; bypassing the beflowered garden on Platform 4; or disappearing into the darkness of the railway tunnels, on her way to who-knows-where. She crosses the train tracks with a certain cockiness: a swagger to her swaying walk. Things weren’t always this way but, just as Felix has grown on the job, so, too, have her confidence and courage.

Much as Felix relishes her role in charge of the station – and make no mistake, this cat is most definitely the Boss – it’s fair to say that she does have a rather regular habit of falling asleep on the job, for she’s just as likely to be found curled up in a colleague’s jacket in the locker room as meeting and greeting customers on the concourse. If she’s not on duty when you call by, hoping for a few words with Huddersfield’s most famous railway star, forgive her absence, for she’s probably catching up on a few ‘zzz’s … before trying to catch some more mice, a key part of her official role as senior pest controller.

For now, though, we leave her sitting at the customer service desk, those sharp emerald eyes missing nothing as she surveys her kingdom, her glitzy purple collar shining brightly in the morning sun. A slim gold disc dangles from it, bearing her name and her home address:

FELIX, PLATFORM 1.

This is the story of the Huddersfield station cat.

1. A Madcap Idea

‘What this station needs,’ announced Gareth Hope one morning in the summer of 2008, ‘is a station cat.’

His colleague, Andy Croughan, laughed out loud. When the two mates got together – as they did most days, after the morning rush hour was over, to kick about some conversation during the quiet phases of their shift – they were always coming up with daft ideas, but this one had to take the biscuit. A station cat? Oh, it was a good bit of mischief, but nothing that would happen in a million years.

They knew that there was a historic tradition of railway cats – back in the days of British Rail, many signalmen used to have them, and Gareth, who was relatively new to the industry, was forever being told stories by old-timers about how there used to be cats at every depot and how they’d all get wage slips every month – but as far as Gareth and Andy knew, the tradition was now history, lost in the railway’s unstoppable modernisation. Winston Churchill had once been pictured fussing over the Liverpool Street station cat, and the idea of Huddersfield getting its own moggy seemed as much a part of the past as that venerated former prime minister.

Yet despite – or perhaps because of – its far-fetched nature, the fantasy of a station cat became a favourite topic of conversation for Gareth and Andy over the next few months, especially during those shifts when the station clock ticked by agonisingly slowly, and discussing daft ideas seemed the only way to make it speed up.

Working on the railway hadn’t been Gareth’s original career plan. He’d attended university to study computer programming, but two years into his course he’d decided he hated it and couldn’t do it for a living. Needing a job, he’d joined the barrier team at Huddersfield station towards the end of 2006 – but soon found that wasn’t for him either. There were no actual ticketing gates when he’d joined the station, so at that time the gateline team themselves formed the only physical barrier stopping fare-dodgers from travelling without tickets. More times than he cared to remember, Gareth, who was slim, willowy and non-confrontational, had found himself on the wrong end of an altercation with an aggressive customer who had pushed him to the ground. He’d been relieved, after just over a year in the job, to get off the frontline and become an announcer (based safely in the office, behind a glass window), but working at the station still felt like a stopgap: something to do while he worked out what he really wanted to do with his life. But he didn’t worry too much about it; he was only twenty-one, so there was plenty of time for figuring it out.

In the meantime, he really enjoyed working at the railway station. Amongst colleagues, it had a family feel; an atmosphere that in truth went beyond the barriers of Huddersfield and spread across the entire railway network. People who worked on the railway would do anything for each other: it was that kind of industry. Once, Gareth had got stuck down south, but a flash of his rail ID card had had the team at the station there going the extra mile to help him get safely back home. At Huddersfield specifically, many of the twenty-six-strong team had worked there for more than twenty years; they knew each other better than most brothers and sisters. In fact, if you’d been clocking in for less than a decade you were known as a ‘young un’.

Gareth and Andy both fell into that category. Andy was a duty manager, also in his early twenties, who’d been at the station since 2006. He was a dynamic, mischievous man with a rangy figure and heaps of energy. Given the team spent more time with each other than they did with their families – sometimes working nights, as Huddersfield was staffed twenty-four hours a day – it was perhaps no surprise that many colleagues became close friends. Andy and Gareth had hit it off immediately, and their very favourite way of entertaining each other was to embark on flights of fancy with their conversation; they had a bit of a reputation for it. The station cat was just one of their crazy ideas; another was that TransPennine Express (TPE), the company which ran the station, should employ Mr T from The A-Team to do the safety announcements (‘Keep behind the yellow line, fool’), while Gareth was also an enthusiastic advocate of changing all the stairs in the station to slides and pulleys, to minimise slips, trips and falls.