There was also lots of Felix publicity on TV and radio, the recordings of which Jack Kempf kept, as an official TPE record of everything Felix had done. By the end of her PR campaign, he had dozens of files in his special Felix folder.
It was brilliant for Felix to have secured so much PR – but the bane of the TPE IT manager’s life! Jack kept getting emails from the IT department, which pleaded with ever-increasing desperation, ‘Please delete space in your drive!’
But while Felix’s media files may have been clogging up Jack’s computer, her hard work was getting the message out there about her book – and how.
The weekend after her book’s first full week on sale, Mark Allan was flicking through the Sunday newspaper. His wife joined him happily, pleased that for once he wasn’t glued to his phone updating Felix’s Facebook page (she was fond of saying wryly, ‘You spend more time with that cat than you do me!’).
But it turned out not to be a Felix-free day, after all. For as Mark turned the pages of the ‘Culture’ section of The Sunday Times, he came across the national book bestseller lists, which chart the top-selling titles of the previous week.
Felix the Railway Cat was sitting pretty at number three. The senior pest controller was not only an author, but a bestselling one at that.
Mark’s wife’s jaw nearly hit the floor and she looked at her husband with pink-cheeked pride. ‘Look, darling!’ she exclaimed happily. ‘It’s in the Sunday Times bestsellers!’
She saw his efforts for Felix rather differently after that.
Many of Felix’s fans were not content merely to read her book. They wanted an autographed copy. Andrew and Jack scratched their heads about how best they could help Felix to supply such a thing. She simply wasn’t a paperwork kind of puss so it really needed some thought. Then Andrew hit upon a brilliant idea: perhaps they could get a mould of her paw and create an autograph stamp from that! Full of enthusiasm, he ordered the bespoke kit, which required Felix to press her paw on to a special piece of paper to create the mould, and headed straight to Huddersfield to secure her paw-tograph.
Well, it was a brilliant idea … but it turned out that Felix was more reclusive than Harper Lee. Though Andrew tried to persuade her to let him hold her front leg so he could press it to the paper, Felix gave him short shrift. He came away with a few new scratches … but no mould. Back to the drawing board.
In the end, Jack managed to order a special pawprint stamp for all the paw-tographs. Mark Allan had a few chuckles when he saw it, as it was super-sized, about as big as his palm. ‘It was more like a lion was signing it than a cat!’ he exclaimed, chuckling heartily. But, in fact, its size made it nice and clear for everyone to see it, and no one seemed to mind. Orders soon flooded in for copies that were ‘signed by the author’ and Felix found herself on the bestseller list for weeks. Waterstones in Huddersfield was soon bombarded with calls and emails from around the world as people clamoured to purchase one of their exclusive paw-printed editions. One unconfirmed rumour even had it that the book was the store’s bestselling title since Harry Potter! Certainly, the book seemed to have a magical effect on Felix’s fans – and that was something the team at Huddersfield station noticed straight away.
Prior to publication, there had been regular visitors to Huddersfield to meet Felix, but it was only one or two every now and again, perhaps a couple of times a week. Now Angela Dunn found that she was called to her lady-in-waiting duties two or three times per shift. The book had reached a whole new audience: people who had never even heard of Facebook, but who loved to read. The glorious image of Felix on the front of the book had captivated a new generation of hearts and minds; children fell in love with Felix through the book and only afterwards discovered that their parents could show them her social media too. Elderly ladies, meanwhile, spotted the book in their mail-order catalogues or at their local library and snapped it up, being big cat fans. The revelation to all that the book was non-fiction – that the cat was real and could be visited in person – soon brought swathes of visitors in a volume the team had never seen before. Felix had been famous before, but this was on another level.
And the team found that there was another difference: people were excited to meet them after reading all about them in the book. The team didn’t even have to be at the station for it to happen. One day, not long after the book came out, Angie Hunte nipped into Tesco after work while still wearing her TPE uniform. As the checkout lady scanned her items, she greeted her cheerily and in a familiar manner. ‘Hiya, Angie!’
‘Oh, hello!’ Angie replied, surprised; she was not sure why she was receiving such a personal greeting.
‘I’ve read all about you!’ the checkout lady enthused, giving her a wide, warm smile, eyes twinkling like stars.
Then strangers started stopping Angie in the street to chat about the cat.
‘How’s Felix, Angie?’
‘She’s grand, thanks,’ Angie would reply – always friendly, no matter who it was who had waylaid her.
‘My girlfriend’s absolutely crazy on that book,’ a fella might say. ‘She’d love to meet the cat.’
‘Well, come up and see her, then!’ Angie would encourage him.
‘Can we?’
‘Of course!’
Angie felt as though Felix had cast a spell over them all, as though the station cat had somehow waved a magic wand with a flick of her padded paws – and in so doing covered Angie and the others with a little of her special stardust.
For Angie, though it was peculiar to be recognised so frequently, the real benefit was that Felix had encouraged people to see the softer side of the railway team. It was important because sadly it wasn’t uncommon for railway staff to bear the brunt of customers’ frustration if their journey was delayed; team members had been verbally abused, spat at and even assaulted. Felix’s book reminded readers that the team were individuals too: good people who were simply trying to do their best, and who were coping with their own struggles even as they helped customers.
One of Angie’s struggles that had been mentioned in Felix’s book was her grief when Billy Bolt had died. Angie found, however, that many readers now shared with her that they too had felt his loss when he’d passed on in the book; some of them had even cried. Though his absence was still mourned at the station, it was nice to know that he lived on through the book in a way. Angie always made a point of showing those visitors where Billy’s memorial bench stood proudly on platform four, and they would all go over and read the gold plaque that honoured his memory, standing respectfully for a few minutes beside it, clearly thinking of him. It made Angie smile to think what Billy might have made of it all – of all these strangers mourning his death anew.
‘Give over!’ he would have said, she thought; and his gruff, no-nonsense voice rang as loudly in her head as if he had really been there. ‘I don’t understand what all the fuss is about!’