Darcey Bussell: 'Since I stopped dancing, I have actually let my figure go horribly Her beginnings, she discloses, were less promising. Her mother had been "very against" allowing her to attend the Royal Ballet school, aged 10. "I struggled," she says, sitting on a small stage of Dartington's medieval Great Hall in interview with the Telegraph's arts editor-in-chief, Sarah Crompton. My first year was a disaster. I had a teacher who said, 'This isn't for you, you don't have the mentality for it, and you're obviously not strong enough. But because I'd had to persuade my mother, I couldn't back down. "I was 38, but I had started very young," she says. There are always younger and better dancers fighting to get your place. You get worn down by the fight to try to stay at the top. Bussell, who moved to Australia with her husband and two children shortly after retirement, says she just felt "low" at first. "I hadn't done anything else - that was it," she said. And then you stop. I did just go 'help" and think 'who am I?" I felt incredibly lost. Luckily I was a mother, so I could latch on to that. Since then, she has taken over the role of judge on the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing, joining veterans Len Goodman, Craig Revel Horwood and Bruno Tonioli, whom she call "the boys." Bussell tells her fans that she struggled to make herself heard after joining the show in 2012. "I shrivel into this little thing, saying 'Hello, can you hear me?" " she laughs. I had spoken with my body all my life. I never had to open my mouth to make a point. When I coach dancers I always like to get on the dance floor with them or describe something by showing them. It's very hard to not be able to move. But the boys were very supportive. And now they're always outside my dressing room saying 'Darce, is there anything you want?" " The detail meets with an approving nod from her audience, who have turned out on a balmy evening to get her book, Darcey Bussell: A Life in Pictures, signed. How, one fan asks, does she keep her figure nowadays? "I have actually let it go horribly," she sighs. But I'm conscious that I don't want to grow out of my clothes, so the thing I try to hold on to is my waist. If I find the pounds are going on I stop eating bread and pasta for a few weeks. And, she adds, "only one glass of red a week." It is the only small moment of dissent in the evening. "Oh, how could she say that?" one maternal older woman chides afterwards. Let herself go! Bussell spends an hour answering questions about her career, then exits stage left, with a bouquet of flowers in hand and a deep curtsey that has been perfected over the decades.