I once hit a car when I was driving a jeep and I was shocked to see the ease with which it crumpled the other vehicle. I was sitting in dense traffic and when it started to move I took off a bit earlier than I was meant to.

I went straight into the back of a van and its back doors immediately buckled, even though the impact felt quite light to me. The driver couldn’t get them open again so he was quite cross.

But worse than that was an incident that happened when I was 13 years old. My mother was driving me, my brother and my sister back from our school near Bayswater, west London.

We stopped at one of those five-way crossovers where there wasn’t a roundabout but probably should have been. Then, just as she went to pull out to go across to the other side, there was a sudden and horrible screeching sound.

I looked up and saw another car heading right towards our side. The driver had decided not to stop at the junction and hadn’t seen us pulling out and he was now frantically braking.

Everything happened before I even had time to open my mouth and scream — the car hit us in the side doors and there was a crunch and the sound of breaking headlights. Thankfully his last-minute decision to brake had reduced his speed so the final impact wasn’t too bad — our car was just knocked sideways a bit.

I think my youngest sister cried with shock, but nobody was hurt. Then my mother burst into tears at the thought of what could have happened. She got out of the car to swap details with the other driver but couldn’t restrain her tears. “I’m a mother,” she told him through her sobs, as if that wasn’t obvious.

Darcey Bussell, 36, is principal ballerina at the Royal Ballet