The new piano was a simple upright brown wooden instrument, accompanied by a smart wooden piano stool with a maroon-velvet cushion. It sat on the concourse, just beyond the gateline, and a sign on its top encouraged passing passengers to ‘PLAY ME’. And so they did …
For Adam Taylor, working on the concourse on the information stand, his Friday-morning shift suddenly took on a new element after the piano arrived. A middle-aged man took to coming in to play the piano and Adam loved listening to him. The man was always dressed smartly, usually in a suit, and he would sit down on the velvet stool at around 11 a.m. and play sad, slow, haunting songs.
When a gifted pianist took their place at the piano, it proved a truly beautiful addition to the station. The sound would sweep up under the corrugated-iron roof and out to the rolling hills beyond, soaring through the station skylights like a flock of melodic birds. The acoustics were astonishing, amplifying the music and translating the melody that flowed from the pianists’ fingers into a sound that touched the heart. Passers-by would stop to listen, their schedule for the day suddenly put out of their minds. A gent in a flat cap and black media glasses might pull his headphones from his ears, wanting to listen instead to the live music. A lady in an LBD and her hair in a bun, meanwhile, would pause a moment, then linger longer. Her neatly pulled-together appearance seemed to unravel a little, somehow, as her foot began tapping to a jazzy tune and her head began bobbing in time.
It was no coincidence that the theologian Albert Schweitzer once said, ‘There are two means of refuge from the misery of life: music and cats.’ Huddersfield, it seemed, had nailed them both. Andy Croughan, witnessing these gifted artists at work, thought that their performances had all the makings of a new Saturday-night TV show: Station Pianists Have Got Talent!
The players were not always quite so tuneful, though. When children plink-plonked on the keys or drunken fools used it to have a laugh on their way home at night, it created a terrible racket.
‘Bloody awful!’ team leader Geoff would mutter at such times, shaking his head wearily at all that he had to endure.
As for Felix, it seemed she shared his reticence when it came to the bad players. Cats have very sensitive hearing – they can hear sounds from 45 to 64,000 Hz, whereas we humans are limited to frequencies between 64 and 23,000 Hz – so for Felix the noise was even more of a headache. She kept a wide berth whenever the piano was occupied.
When it first arrived, however, she did give the empty piano a thorough investigation, leaping up on to its wooden top and sashaying along it while her flicking tail kept time like a metronome. Though it would make a lovely story, the team had never actually seen her walking along the keys – as fun as it is to imagine Felix making up her own compositions at night, perhaps even following in the footsteps of her namesake Felix Mendelssohn. But this didn’t stop Angela Dunn from joking, if ever asked if Felix liked to interact with the piano, ‘Oh yes, she plays a lovely Mozart!’
That October, it was sad songs that seemed apt for the station. It was always emotional when much-loved members of the team moved on and a card now began circulating behind the scenes for the team to say good luck and goodbye to Chris Bamford, whose last shift was scheduled for 23 October 2017. He had been a key colleague through Felix’s rise to fame and both the cat and her human companions would miss him dearly. Ironically, despite the station being the setting for thousands of goodbyes, day in and day out, it never got any easier for the team to say farewell to colleagues who had become nothing less than family.
Midway through the month, another card started doing the rounds among the Huddersfield team – this time for Karl, who had been taken ill on his return from holiday. He’d been admitted to hospital and the station rallied round one of their favourite team members at once in order to wish him a speedy recovery.
Angela Dunn came into work on Saturday 14 October feeling a bit miserable; she’d just had a week’s holiday in Malta and had four and a half days of rain. She looked for Karl as soon as she got to the station, as with him having also been on holiday at the same time, they’d had a little joke before they’d gone away about who would have the most sunshine. She wanted to tell him that he had most definitely won! But Karl was nowhere to be seen.
In the office, she saw the get-well-soon card laid out on the desk.
‘Who’s poorly?’ she asked.
‘It’s Karl,’ her colleagues told her. ‘He’s not right well. He’s been in hospital for the past couple of days or so.’
‘Oh, that’s not good,’ said Angela, sympathising. She scribbled down her best wishes to him – ‘Get well soon Karl, love Ange’ – and then turned her attention to the grim reality of the first shift back at work. Even Felix couldn’t help make that one fly by any faster.
But not two hours later, work at the station ground to a halt. The team leader on duty, David Jackson, called everybody into the office and told them to leave off whatever it was they were doing. What’s going on now? wondered Angela. It was far too early for Chris Bamford’s send-off, and there was no meeting in the diary.
David stood in front of his colleagues. His face looked ashen and shocked. Seconds later, so did everybody else’s.
‘I’m sorry to have to tell you,’ he said, ‘but Karl died this morning.’
Nobody spoke. The news seemed to have driven all words and all sense from the world. At first, the railway workers couldn’t compute what David had said to them. Only after a minute or two was the spell broken, and the stone statues they’d become at hearing of Karl’s death slowly began moving once more. First one colleague cried, then another. The team stood in shock, not knowing what to say or do. The news hit them very, very hard. Karl was everybody’s friend: a warm, loving, funny, helpful, young man who had adored his job on the railway. For the rest of the shift, Angela and the others operated in a stunned state of disbelief and devastation. Angela kept thinking: Why? She’d only just been told he was ill, but now he had gone forever. It was extremely difficult to take in.
Everybody missed Karl. Everybody had had a joke with him or a memory of a time he’d gone the extra mile to make them smile. He was only twenty-nine and he’d been at Huddersfield for barely a year, yet he’d made a massive impact on the entire station. He’d had his whole life ahead of him. He’d had so many plans for the future. But now all that lay in the dust.
Sara, Karl’s best friend, who was not on shift that morning, heard the news from the station manager, Andy Croughan. Knowing how close she was to her colleague, he’d phoned her as soon as Karl’s family had told him the news. She’d been about to go and visit her friend in hospital, as she’d done nearly every day that past week, but as she listened to Andy telling her firmly that she must speak to Karl’s fiancée before she left the house, she read between the words. In the spaces between them was a terrible truth that was somehow even worse for being unspoken. So she insisted that he tell her more and Andy broke the news.
It was a massive shock. A red-raw pain. Karl had been her best friend in the whole world. They had spoken every day. But, now, there was only silence.
Sara felt stunned. It had been so sudden, and so unexpected, that it was difficult to process. She stayed at home that first day, pretty much unable to function, but she forced herself back to work on Monday. But although she was there physically, her head wasn’t in the right place. It was so horrible to be standing out on the platforms, where Karl had always stood beside her, and see another colleague trying to fill his shoes.
Sara found she kept bursting into tears at work. Everybody was so kind, knowing how close she and Karl had been, but in a way their kindness made it worse. Only Felix’s cuddles were comforting. The cat seemed to pick up on her grief as she had done with others, so many times before. Sara found her attention reassuring, as Felix snuggled down in her lap for a stroke or simply sat with her as she cried. Felix was always there for her … and so was someone else.