Felix The Railway Cat

‘Na-na-na-na-na,’ the second crow chorused. He and his buddy were now either side of Felix, taking the mickey out of her as her black head flicked in frustration between them, as if she was watching a tennis match. She made a decision and started to edge towards one, but then changed her mind and tried to go for the other. The crows thought it was a great game and continued to tease her, cawing loudly, until Felix lost her temper and rushed at one of them. Then both took off with a colossal flapping of their inky wings, and Felix was left behind. If she could have growled, she would.

What was probably most annoying for Felix was that the crows were the only creatures who didn’t show her respect. For Felix, at age two, had blossomed into the most beautiful adult cat you can imagine, and everyone else she encountered seemed to fall at her fluffy white feet.

Her fluffy coat was what attracted people’s attention first. She really was the most remarkably downy cat, and her regular trips to the grooming parlour and Felix’s own attentive ablutions ensured her coat was kept in tip-top condition. Her fluffiness went all the way down to her tail, which acted as a glorious boa for this glamourpuss; Felix was constantly draping it over the edges of the furniture she was sitting on and flicking it back and forth as she swung her hips and sauntered about the station. It was her eyes, however, that really had her admirers swooning. They were those classic reflective cat’s eyes, a gorgeous pale green, like summer grass, but with a hint of silvery moonshine to them. With those, and her enormous white whiskers fanning out from her ebony nose, she had the loveliest little face. She had finally grown into her pointy black ears with white tufts, too. The whole look was enhanced by the pretty pink collar Angie had bought for her, and that shiny hot-pink tag. Whichever way you looked at it, Felix the cat was all grown up.

But there remained one final hurdle Felix had not yet managed to clear. Perhaps mindful of her colleagues’ warnings when she was a kitten, Felix had not yet crossed the train tracks.

She stuck to the side of the station she’d grown up on, and her manor comprised Platforms 1 and 2 only. There was plenty to entertain her there: the bunnies bounding around near the tunnels, the abandoned carriage, the lost-property office and the sanctuary of the bike racks. Though as a kitten she’d been carried to Platform 4 via the subway, riding like a feathered parrot on Gareth Hope’s shoulder, Angela Dunn reported that she never used the stairs herself. So with Felix obeying the painted warnings to ‘keep behind the yellow line’, there was no way for her to cross to whatever magical world might lie beyond the tracks on Platform 4 – or further afield.

Yet as she grew older, Felix found that she wanted to explore that world. The Huddersfield team had almost come to believe that she would never cross to the other side – but never was a very long time.

So, as Felix glared at the crows in that early summer of 2013, perhaps she watched them with a certain amount of envy, too. They had the freedom to fly wherever they wanted, but Felix’s world was bordered by the bright yellow line.

Nevertheless, she was an adult cat now. Maybe, just maybe, she was old enough at last to learn how to walk the tracks safely, like Dave Chin and the shunt drivers did in their orange hi-vis uniforms.

Well, there was no time like the present to find out. Felix got up from her favourite position by the bike racks and gave herself a little shake. She yawned, showing her sharp white teeth and her rough pink tongue, and stretched along her tippy-toes. She was ready. She was going to try.

She walked nervously to the yellow line on Platform 1. There were a few customers milling about, but it wasn’t especially busy and no one was paying her much attention. She looked left; she looked right. She listened hard. By now, having lived at the station for two whole years, Felix knew the schedule of the services possibly better than anyone else around, and indeed a train was not due. She walked to the very edge of the platform, and bunched her paws together on the ledge. To a human observer, it might have looked reckless, but Felix knew exactly what she was doing, and how to do it safely.

With one powerful leap, she dived off the edge of the platform and down onto the tracks. Once more she paused, listening with every potent sense she had, with her front paws balanced on the first metal rail. There were no vibrations through it. Cats are very sensitive to the slightest tremors; they are said to be able to detect earthquakes ten or fifteen minutes earlier than humans can. But there were no pulsations on the rails at that moment; no train was anywhere nearby.