Felix The Railway Cat

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.