CANDIDA CREWE: My whole life has been a Dry January. When people ask why I don’t drink, I tell them I don’t like the taste. But the truth is far more harrowing…

All my life I only drank alcohol occasionally, but never drank. At the age of sixty, apart from the occasional G&T, I am virtually a teetotaler. As people prepare for Dry January with varying levels of enthusiasm, they often ask me about my secret. I tell them that as a teenager I never liked the taste.

Yet I grew to love leeks and avocado and all the other things I hated as a child. Why no drinks?

The truth is that ever since a near-tragic accident at the age of 15, I have always had, at best, an ambivalent attitude towards it. Being at the mercy of someone else’s drunken lack of control, I vowed never to abandon myself to such hopelessness and potential danger again.

It happened half a lifetime ago, when my friend Joanna and I were traveling in the back of her boyfriend David’s car. Drunk on a mixture of cider, beer, cheap white wine, vodka and impatience, he drove at 90mph along a road near Shaftesbury in Dorset.

David brought along two other 17-year-old boys, who also seemed to find the speed exciting. I didn’t. To me it spelled doom. Just minutes into the journey we had narrowly missed a huge truck in front of us, braking inches from the bumper as all five of us lurched forward as if we were dying of illness. David laughed and cheered.

He started revving the engine with a frustration mixed with f-words. His friends, also plastered, drank from bottles and cans, their free arms hanging out of the open windows, holding cigarettes and a joint; warm air flowing over their skin. A cassette tape was playing loudly.

This was the summer of 1979 and the five of us had just come out of a field next to a church. We had had a picnic consisting of Cheddar crackers, Dairylea cheese, alcohol and sexual tension. I was the only one who didn’t drink, because yes, I didn’t like the taste.

Joanna and I were away from our girls’ boarding school for the weekend and were staying with her parents. We had spent the afternoon away from all the adults, enjoying our smug independence while it lasted.

When it was time to go home, David took the wheel as if he were the King of the Road; his friends, his courtiers; Jo and I, their 15 year old moles. The sun was shining, we were young and we were invincible.

However, David was soon behind that slow truck – and it turned out that we were not as invincible as we thought.

I sat in the middle of the backseat. No seat belts. Four years later they were made mandatory.

I was sober and alert, but unfortunately two years younger than the calm boy in charge of our elevator and unable to drive. As he pushed himself against the back of the truck, I sat in the back in a state of fear. I was fully aware that I was completely at the mercy of his erratic, booze- and testosterone-fueled bravado – but of course I said nothing.

Maintaining the appearance of calm was more important than life itself. Express my fear to boys older than me, proud and worldly with their bottles and cans? Say something as socially unbearable as “take it easy!” or ‘you can’t drive, you’ve had too much to drink’? Over my dead body – almost literally.

Like teenagers everywhere, I wanted to fit in. Saying anything was out of the question. And anyway, given human nature, he would have sensed my fear and moved even faster.

I suspect it was the same catastrophic machismo that sent 19-year-old Thomas Johnson driving 100 miles per hour while inhaling nitrous oxide in June 2023.

Last month he was found responsible for the deaths of his three passengers – two 18-year-olds and one aged 17 – when his BMW 3 Series veered into a tree along the A415 near Abingdon in Oxfordshire. He was jailed for nine years and was described by the sister of one of the victims as ‘just a stubborn teenage boy’. Johnson was “not a terrible person,” but someone who had made “some terrible decisions.”

Reading about the case brings me back in vivid detail to that terrible afternoon 45 years ago. Like Johnson, my driver made some terrible decisions, only they weren’t decisions at all.

They were drunken actions, driven by the timeless and foolish desire of young men to show off to their friends.

In October last year, the AA motoring body proposed restrictions on newly trained young drivers, including a six-month ban on under-21s giving lifts to people of the same age. The ban, which would come into effect from the day they pass their test, could give the joyriders and show-offs some respite.

And yet young men under the influence of alcohol or drugs and in possession of a powerful motorcycle will always endanger others, regardless of the rules.

When a thundering truck insults the wheels of a cocky boy by traveling at a ridiculous speed of 60 km/h, it is simply an invitation for him to show his superior skills, machine and muscles to his friends, all limitations be damned.

The A-road we were on, which had already been insultingly winding for several miles, suddenly became a straight road from Rome with views of wheat fields on either side. Our cocky teenage driver took another swig from his bottle, downshifted, revved up and ya-ha’d into the back of what was to him the vehicular equivalent of an obese OAP.

He quickly switched into the oncoming lane – and in it was an oncoming car, innocently doing 60.

Even at that moment, none of us, four passengers, told him to stop. The boys, keeping up their bravado, screamed, though they must have been as scared as I was. Jo and I were speechless.

Time didn’t do the cliché of standing still, but stretched out like one of those rubber exercise tires as I watched in horror as the other car drove towards us just as we landed on it. As we caught up, the length of the truck was that of a football field, with the dark sides flapping and rattling next to us.

And then the sound of the head-on collision. A heavy, deadly crunch like an explosion, followed by total silence. I remember asking myself if I was still alive; I didn’t dare open my eyes for fear that the others around me might be dead too.

I didn’t know I wasn’t dead until it dawned on me with new fear that the car might explode. This was followed by the instinctive exit and onto the high, grassy bank next to the road.

All three boys lay next to me on the bank, twisted with various injuries; shocked into instant sobriety. One of them had a jagged bone protruding from his shin, and the broken skin was bloody like a roadkill. The other two were not seriously injured, but gagged and cried out.

There was no sign of Jo, but a sense of moaning from the car. I tried to get her out of the wreckage. I called, reaching hopelessly for her through the broken glass and mashed metal. Then the cold realization of what her lack of response might mean sank in; its implications sink in and are already haunting. I started shaking so much that my knees buckled.

The unconscious groans were finally interrupted by blue lights and sirens. No reliance on mobile phones in those days. A witness must have driven to the next village and called 999 from a telephone box.

I can still see the boys on the bank, the blood and the gore. The image is imprinted in my brain like a Francis Bacon painting. And I can still hear the toddler-like screams that had overshadowed the teenage screams, but I have no idea what happened next. How I got home. My parents’ reaction. Not one thing. The brain has mercifully suppressed all of that.

I escaped unscathed: cuts and bruises. So did the boys, except for the one with a jagged tibia that had escaped from his leg. But Jo was in hospital for a year with a broken back. Fortunately, she is doing well now. I’m ashamed to say that I have no idea how many people were in the oncoming car or who they were. No one ever told me and I may have been too traumatized to ask. All I know is that none of them died.

It is too lame to say that the fact that no one lost their lives was a miracle. But the incident changed me. I don’t get flashbacks, but I’m sure I have to be extra careful every time I go on a long drive. I don’t judge my driving skills, but perhaps the accident has made me a more aware driver than I would have been otherwise.

But the more immediate effect is the effect it has had on my relationship with alcohol. That is, the fact that I just don’t really drink and never have. It’s a personal matter. I really don’t notice that people around me are drunk unless they are literally cold on the ground. As a non-drinker it is all the more important never to judge others, except of course those who get into a car half cut and try to drive it.

I’m also rarely a passenger, preferring to drive unless I’m with my boyfriend, who is the opposite of stubborn at the wheel – and also happens to be a teetotaler. I wouldn’t want to be with a speed freak, drunk or sober. In all our road trips together, he never even made me blink.

Like I said, no one died on that day in 1979, but the consequences of that stupid driver – and all those stupid drivers who aren’t as lucky as the one I landed with – have been visible over the years.

To this day, people constantly ask me why I don’t drink. When I was younger, I got so tired of being told that I couldn’t possibly not like the taste of all alcohol that I used to say I was in AA. That shut them up and allowed us to move on to more interesting topics. Now I say I don’t like it, but in the authoritative tone of a middle-aged woman – which means we don’t have to talk about it all night.

I won’t mention the car accident. In some ways, it’s better not to do self-analysis with strangers – and who knows to what extent the crash was cause and effect?

People always tell me they admire me because I don’t drink. No admiration necessary, because there is no struggle involved. I admire those who love it but give it up, for all the reasons people do. For them, Dry January is a sacrifice. It’s hard and it takes willpower. They’re the admirable ones, not me – perhaps especially the younger ones among them whose restraint might also help them discover the unexpected joys of complete control – with the added bonus of a reduced risk of killing their friends.