My daughter ran to the car and Her words burned a hole in my

In a heartbreaking few seconds, seven words would transform a family.

As her father John Patterson started his car heading for another drinking session, eight-year-old Peyton ran outside to beg him not to go.

Wiping the rain from the driver’s window, she pleaded: “Please, daddy don’t go to the pub.”

It was John’s rock bottom. “It burned a hole in my heart,” he now admits.

He had been an alcoholic for 10 years and, even after two attempts at giving up, was drinking again. After his daughter’s tearful intervention, he would never touch a drop again.

“I was a functioning alcoholic – something I am not proud of,” said car spray painter John, 34, from Annan.

“My first drink was a trip down to the pub for a morning break of two pints and then a session after work.

“It got to the stage where I was knocking back 15 pints, 10 cans of lager and smoking 40 cigarettes every day.

“I worked for myself and was able to take time off whenever I wanted.

“I am ashamed to say that all this drinking meant I saw little of my wife Joanne and three lovely daughters.

“I cringe when I look back at the husband and dad I was.”

Attempts to give up always ended in failure because John believed he could handle a pint.

“Like a fool, I thought one can of lager couldn’t do any harm, but it always sent me spiralling downwards again.”

He was a well-known figure in his local pub, standing at the bar in his garage worker’s overalls.

“Somehow I managed to keep up my standard of work,” he said.

But the tearful plea from his daughter Peyton, now 10, not to go back to the pub was to be his turning point.

“I drove the car round the block and came back to the house knowing I would never drink again.

“It was a now-or-never moment. Who could say no to your daughter when she is pleading you to stay out of the pub?”

Peyton, who has two sisters – Paige 13, and Danielle, four – remembers the moment, and says: “We just wanted dad to be home with us and not out at the pub.”

For John, it had come at the end of a 10-year drink marathon punctuated by several attempts to give up.

The first had been when his wife Joanne was pregnant with