I suspect that most newspapermen have one story which qualifies as the most unforgettable in their experience. I have. I covered it more than twenty years ago.

I also suspect that for most of us, the story that stays with us is not our biggest or most immportant. Mine isn't. It is the story of an old man whom I never saw, and a black and white cat I saw only once. Their actions made no impact on the history of our times.

It happened like this. E.G. Bonney, the Melbourne Herald's chief of staff (Australian equivalent of the Fleet Street News Editor) said to me one morning in December, 1930: "I heard a queer yarn last night about an old man and a cat. I could not make head or tail of it, but it seemd to hold the germ of a story. Here's the address;"

I went to the address he gave me and found a villa in Clyde Street, St. Kilda, a seaside suburb about five miles from the city. A pleasant-faced woman in early middle-age opened the door. She told me her name was Mrs. King. Her eyes wrinkled in puzzlement when I cautiously asked if she knew anything about an old man and a cat. Then a light broke through.

"Of course," she said, "that would be Dad and Felix. . . Don't tell me any newspaper is interested in that !"

I assured her the Herald was interested. She laughed. All right then, she'd tell me, if I didn't mind wasting my time, and this was her story.

Two years or so earlier, a friend had given her a black and white kitten about five or six weeks old. He was a cute little fellow, but nobody in the King household took much notice of him except Mrs. King's father, Thomas Lynan, a north of Ireland man nearing ninety years of age. "Dad just loved that kitten from the first," Mrs. King told me, and the kitten was mad on him. "You never saw them apart. It was Dad who named him Felix."

The old man fed Felix, never failing to save a choice bit of his dinner. Felix trotted beside him when he went to the corner tobacconist's or the nearby newspaper shop. Thd old man tought the cat to box, and Felix learned to balance on his hind legs and weave like a pugilist with his forepaws.

Then on June 28th, 1930, Mr. Lynan died. He had just turned ninety. Felix watched the funeral procession move off, never dreaming they were taking his friend away, then slunk off into the house and mourned in solitude.

He was inconsolable. He ate, but only enough to keep alive. By day he crept about the house seeking the old man who had been his constant companion for eighteen months; by night he lay on the front door-mat watching for the return of his lost friend.

Nearly five months went by and Felix's melancholy show no signs of lift- ing. The Kings were worried. They feared the cat would fret to death. One sunny afternoon they went driving and took Felix with them in the hope of waking him from his despondency. They were driving along St. Kilda Road, a broad and busy thoroughfare, the chief highway linking St. Kilda with the City.

The car halted to let cross traffic pass at one of the intersections and Felix, who had been lying inert, got to his fee, coat bristling. He stood trembling for a second and then sprang to the open window of the car and dived to the roadway. The Kings watched him scuttle through the traffic and disappear at full speed, his tail waving like a black banner.

The Kings went home and watched for Felix day after day. He did not appear. After a week they gave him up for lost.

It was about ten days after he dived from the car and three weeks or so before my call on Mrs. King, that the Kings and their five-year-old daughter, Valerie, want to see Mr. Lyman's grave in Melbourne General Cemetery, which lies on the other side of Melbourne, nine or ten miles from their home.

"I couldn't believe my eyes," Mrs. King told me. "There was Felix, walking up and down on the grave-stone like a sentry. He nearly went mad when he saw us. He jumped at Valerie and started to box her the way he had played boxing with Dad. How he got there I do not know. He had never been within miles of the Cemetery in his life."

The Kings knew beyond doubt that the cat was Felix. He carried two unmistakeable identity badges - a scar near one eye where an air-gun pellet had wounded him in kittenhood, and a kink in his tail which had been broken in early youth.

The Kings tended Mr. Lynan's grave and laid flowers on it and then picked up Felix and carried him to the car. Twice they got him as far as the Cemetery gates, and twice risking his neck he jumped from the moving car and raced back to his old friend's grave.

"In the end," Mrs. King told me, "we decided it would be kinder to let him stay behind." They arranged with the gravediggers to feed him and anyway they knew that an active cat like him could live by catching rabbits and birds that made home in the Cemetery.

I drove over to the Cemetery after hearing Mrs. King's story. There on guard over the grave stood Felix. At all events, the cat I saw was black and white with a scar over one eye and a kinky tail.

I have covered bigger stories, but I still remember the tale of Felix more vividly than any of the others, including the events, say, of the retreat in Greece, the Battle of El Alamein or the Normandy landing. Perhaps because I am a sucker for cats, or perhaps because the story haunts me because there are in it features beyond the frontiers of human understanding.