What we read in times of national and global turbulence can be telling. ‘I held those two pages very close during the darkest moments of my life,’ Fish says. Fish cites two of the most popular images, in which the Horse and the Boy cite the power of asking for help. He was experiencing suicidal thoughts having been signed off work after suffering from years of workplace harassment, but remembered the messages of Mackesy’s paintings at his 2018 exhibition. John Fish, another reader, tells me the book has saved his life. ‘It has given me strength, encouragement, laughter and a voice in the hardest of times.’ ‘It’s as if manages to put into words all the jumbled thoughts I am carrying in my head and jumbled feelings in my heart,’ she says. Ritchie says the book continues to help on her healing journey, and she finds herself reaching for it often. ‘It was so refreshingly simple, uncomplicated and fresh.’ People have found The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse a balm and an uplift. Lynsey Ritchie was given the book when she was half-way through 15 rounds of chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer.
Mackesy’s drawings and words, which encouraged kindness and support, found their way onto the sides of buildings people were getting his characters tattooed on their bodies.
And yet, in the final dark months of 2019, the tremulous beginning of 2020 and the swirling chaos of the pandemic year, it offered hope to hundreds of thousands of people. It’s not aimed at any clear audience, and works as well for eight-year-olds as it does octogenarians. The four titular characters meet one another and share each other’s confidence. Rather than a linear narrative, it’s a collection of quiet musings and conversations. The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse isn’t a conventional picture book. Two years after release, and Mackesy's book is the longest-running Sunday Times hardback chart-topper to date. What nobody realised, then, was that this was the start of what would become the surprise hit of the year. Someone commented that the image took them ‘right back to the feel of my own storybook childhood’, another joked that the boy and the mole were discussing politics. Another mole day I think,’ the artist captioned it.
The boy looks young, barely a toddler, barely the size of the mole, and the mole looks slightly concerned it adds to the cuteness. Three years ago, Charlie Mackesy uploaded a drawing of a boy and a mole to his Instagram account.
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