Felix The Railway Cat

Inevitably, as Gareth had regularly sat and chatted with Andy at his desk about their shared enthusiasm for a station cat, the passing colleagues had listened and chipped in. It had now been over a year since Gareth had first suggested it, and during the past twelve months everybody who worked at the station had heard them talking about it – and loads of the team had come on board with the idea. Huddersfield had long been an animal-friendly station – the team had a pet-pictures noticeboard, where they stuck up snapshots of their cats and dogs in the mess room – and by now the majority of the team were behind the campaign. They even added to the banter: a new gag was that the cat could be employed as a pest controller, to tackle the station’s non-existent ‘mouse problem’. But everybody knew the truth: mice had nothing to do with it; they wanted a cat because it would be fun, and a real pleasure to come to work and share a shift with a furry friend.

Even the team leaders supported the idea. Although they reported to Paul, it didn’t necessarily mean that he was always in charge; many of the team leaders had worked at the station for decades and had the wisdom and experience to prove it. In fact, their affectionate nickname for the manager was ‘Babyface’ because Paul was still relatively young, especially in comparison to them.

Perhaps the most influential of these team leaders was the inimitable Angie Hunte. A warm, outgoing black woman with an infectious laugh and a larger-than-life character, Angie had given more than twenty years’ service to the station, and over that time she had proved herself to be a powerful matriarchal figure within it. Even Paul had learned that it was to his benefit to get Angie on side with new ideas, for she had huge influence at the station owing to the high esteem in which she was held. When she’d first chatted with Gareth and Andy about the station cat, Gareth had felt extremely apprehensive. If she hates it, he’d thought with trepidation, even as he extolled the virtues of his pet idea, it will never happen.

But a beaming smile had spread across Angie’s face as the idea took hold. It was more than Gareth could have hoped for. ‘Angie being enthusiastic about the cat idea was like a green light,’ he recalled. ‘I remember thinking: it might go somewhere now.’

But Angie wasn’t the only one with influence. Huddersfield had six team leaders, who each worked in shifts, taking full responsibility for the station and team when on duty. And another of these was a chap called Billy, who’d worked alongside Angie for decades. He’d worked his whole life on the railway, first as a conductor and latterly as a team leader. In his late fifties, he was the elder statesman of the station – and known for being grumpy in a granddad kind of way. Angie had known him so long, and got on with him so well, that she had teasingly nicknamed him ‘Mr Grumpy’. He was short and balding, and his years of professed misery had etched that expression into his lined face.

Billy was known for telling things straight. If he didn’t agree with you, he would come right out and say you were talking a lot of rubbish. If he thought you were being a fool, he told you as much, and he wouldn’t do it in a nice PC way.

When Billy first heard about the campaign to get a station cat, he thought it was silly. He was dismissive; and it seems the manager, Paul, still felt the same way. Despite Angie’s enthusiasm and Gareth’s creative poster campaign, the manager remained unmoved.

Undaunted, as the months passed and the idea took even deeper hold, Gareth tried to appeal directly to Paul’s business brain. Knowing his manager was a man for facts, figures and charts, Gareth took the time to produce a summary of the pros and cons of getting a station cat:

Pros

Cons

Happy customers

Happy team

Historic tradition

Pest control

Our NPS (national passenger survey) scores will undoubtedly go through the roof …

Good PR

Obviously, there were no cons …

But the chart went the way of all the posters before it. As 2009 turned into 2010, and then into 2011, Gareth was still no closer to realising his dream – nor to moving on from the station, as he’d said he would do … one day.

It was in the spring of 2011 that some intriguing news reached him on the office grapevine, borne to him via the passing footsteps of his colleagues journeying through the announcer’s office. Paul, so rumour had it, was being seconded to a job elsewhere in the business. So someone else would be taking charge of the station in his absence – and that someone else would have the power to veto or green-light the idea of the station cat.

When he heard who’d got the job, Gareth couldn’t repress the grin that stretched across his face. He ran to meet Andy, his long-time partner in crime – and the man who had just been appointed acting station manager. Andy’s wide smile matched Gareth’s own.