TV star Vicky Pattison ’s father is an alcoholic. It took her until the age of 28 to say the words out loud and to come to terms with what her dad’s illness and relationship with drink might mean for her.
“My childhood is peppered with moments that I thought were normal, that as an adult I’ve discovered weren’t,” Pattison, 34, says. “I thought houses were loud and noisy and sometimes quite scary - and a lot of houses aren’t.
“If you’d asked me at eight, nine years old if I was ever going to have a drink, I would have said no. I would have said, ‘There’s no way I’m ending up like my dad’. And I hate that that was even something that was in my mind that young.”
