Felix The Railway Cat

Angela and Billy burst into laughter.

‘Oh, Felix!’ cried Angela affectionately. ‘Bloomin’ heck, love. You’re not supposed to let them go!’

Poor old Felix. But the pest controller of Huddersfield station was a clever cat and, now she had some hands-on experience, like the most eager intern she was as keen as mustard to land a real job with the skills she had learned.

She stayed by the bike racks. It had worked for her with mouse number one, and she trusted its sturdy metal docking gates like firm friends. Felix shrewdly started using the bike racks to help her in her quest to catch her first mouse. She used to trap the rodents by the silver limbs of the bike rack, and pin them there with her paw. She was starting to feel she’d got the hang of this mouse-catching business now. For a game, she would let them go a certain distance, then she’d pin them again. Let them go … Bring them back. Let them go … Bring them back. Felix started to enjoy herself. Then, one day by the bike racks, when Felix was about a year old, she jumped all over the mouse she’d caught – she just went for it, fearlessly, claws and teeth and all – and it was game over for the mouse. It was an instinctive assassination.

Felix felt so, so, so proud of herself. She picked up the dead mouse in her jaws and trotted up to the door of the office, where she knew Angie Hunte was working. She wanted to show her what she had done. Her tail stood tall and straight as she walked: a flagpole that perhaps she wished she could run a banner up to read: ‘FELIX CAUGHT A MOUSE!’ Her hips and her shoulders almost shimmied as she walked the few short paces to the door, the pride rippling down her back. Just wait till her mum saw this.

Angie opened the door and saw the dead mouse hanging limply in her baby’s mouth. She nearly had a fit.

‘Felix,’ Angie said, trying to control her queasy dismay, as the cat looked perkily up at her, waiting for the shower of praise she knew must come, ‘I love you to bits.’ Felix’s tail wagged proudly. Yes, here it comes … ‘But I really, really don’t want your presents, my darling.’

Angie was more than a bit squeamish about the dead mice and rats that Felix now brought to her, again and again and again, as the station cat got into her stride. But Angie couldn’t bear to deal with dead vermin. The lads she worked with helped out instead.

‘I’ll get rid of it, Angie,’ they would say. And when they came out to collect up the bodies, Felix would finally get the praise she was after. ‘Well done, Felix!’ her colleagues would chorus. ‘Who’s a clever pest controller?’

With Felix’s career going from strength to strength, someone at the station clearly thought her achievements needed formal recognition. On the wall in the team leaders’ office hung a hierarchy chart of the company: a diagram with everyone’s names and job titles listed, showing who reported to whom. The chart was shaped like a pyramid, the general members of staff at its wide bottom, the team leaders in the narrowing middle and above them, at the apex, Paul, the station manager.

Someone – and no one, to this day, has ever confessed who – now took a pen and drew a little box above the manager’s name. In it, they wrote: FELIX.

‘Well,’ said Angie, ‘as far as we’re concerned, she is the Boss!’

18. Stranger Danger

Felix the railway cat, pest controller extraordinaire, leapt lightly to the ground from the metal benches arrayed on Platform 1. As well as spending hours sitting there, it was now part of Felix’s exercise regime to use the benches as a piece of athletics equipment, for they had three thin armrests on them and when Felix ducked her head beneath these armrests, they formed a tunnel for her: she would squeeze through them, as low as she could get, before jumping down to the floor.

Sometimes, a customer would join her on the bench – or vice versa – and the two would sit in companionable silence. Felix, on the whole, got on well with the customers. By now, the regular commuters knew her of old; some would even bring the occasional treat for her, which endeared them to Felix even more, for the way to the station cat’s heart was most definitely through her stomach. Though she hadn’t lost that grumpy assertiveness she’d started to showcase towards the end of 2011, as the summer of 2012 progressed Felix’s personality, on the whole, was sunny enough to match the weather. She was quite comfortable winding through people’s legs, and even enduring the patting hands of young children.