Felix The Railway Cat

He redoubled his efforts to find permanent homes for the terrible twins. And here, at last, he heard on the railway network that Angie Hunte had been putting out a message of her own: Huddersfield station wanted to employ a station cat. Did anyone know of any kittens who might be up to the job?

It was important to Angie and the team that it was a kitten who joined them. It wouldn’t have been fair to an older, former house cat to throw it in at the deep end in a working environment, what with the danger of the trains and the noise and bustle of a busy station. Huddersfield hosted approximately 5 million customer journeys each year, with fifteen trains per hour, which placed it in the top 100 busiest stations in the country. You couldn’t teach an old cat the kind of new tricks that a railway cat would need to learn, but if a kitten grew up there it would learn on the job how to be a station cat.

Angie and Chris soon met up to talk all things kitten. At that time Chris was often at Huddersfield for work, so a meeting was easy enough to arrange.

Angie greeted him with one of her classic beaming smiles. ‘So, we’re looking to decrease our pest control bill,’ she said, eyes sparkling with good humour, ‘go a bit greener and employ a kitten instead. I hear you might be able to help – how much are you wanting for them?’

‘Oh, I’m not wanting anything for them,’ Chris replied quickly. Thinking of the scratches on his legs, in the nicest possible way he was going to be rather pleased to be shot of the kittens. To know that he wasn’t going to be stuck with at least one of the terrible twins was great news. In addition, given the network nature of the railway, he thought there was also a bit of kudos in the fact that it was going to be his cat that would be the Huddersfield station cat; that he would be its granddaddy. He would never live that one down.

Above all, though, he and Joanne were simply pleased that the kitten would be going to a permanent, loving home, where the Briscoes could be sure that it was going to be well looked after. In fact, judging by the grin on Angie’s face when he agreed that she could have one of the kittens, it was going to be downright spoilt.

‘We’d like a boy,’ Angie added, almost as an afterthought, as they drew the conversation to a close. After all, she and the team didn’t want to push it: it felt like a miracle that HQ had agreed to the station cat. Nobody thought that the powers-that-be would appreciate having kittens on top of that, so everyone felt safer if the new recruit was a boy.

As it happened, Chris didn’t actually know the gender of the kittens. And when the train dispatcher who planned to take the two tabby cats came to visit her new charges at his home he openly confessed his ignorance.

‘I don’t know how to sex kittens,’ he admitted. ‘You’ll have to do it yourself.’

Unfazed, the dispatcher picked up the tabby cats and said, ‘That one’s definitely a boy and that’s definitely a girl.’ She would go on to call them Percy and Max, respectively. Then she reached over and plucked one of the black-and-white kittens from the basket and turned it upside-down. ‘Definitely a boy,’ she announced. She picked up his twin, the fluffy one, and did the same. There was so much long-haired fur around its bits that it was a little harder to see, but she made a pronouncement nonetheless. ‘Definitely a boy.’ She seemed to know what she was talking about.

Chris let Angie know the good news: both the black-and-white kittens were boys, so she could take her pick. There was good news for Chris, too: a lady who worked in the Huddersfield booking office, Pam, had said that her mum would give a home to whichever kitten the station didn’t want, so both of them would be off his hands for good.

Joanne and Chris assessed the terrible twins as they scampered boisterously about the house. Apart from the fact that one was a lot fluffier than the other, there was barely any difference between them. They’d noticed only one thing that marked them out. The kittens, as you’d expect, had a heap of toys to play with (some actual toys and some hijacked by the kittens in fun). They had a scratching post with a ball on a string and in their turn all the kittens had climbed up the pole and then dived off, jumping on the ball; there were half a dozen squeaky mice for them to pounce on, too. And it was one of these mice toys that differentiated the twins. It was one of those toys where you’d pull the string at the side and the mouse would vibrate really, really quickly, making it skid along the floor. One of the black-and-white kittens was absolutely terrified of it – but the other was in his element. Over and over, he’d jump on it, pounce on it … boom: game over. Killer instinct in action.