A 100-year-old woman cheated death after a car crashed into her bedroom while she slept in the early hours of the morning.

Amy Austin — who celebrated her 100th birthday in May this year — was surrounded by chunks of masonry — as well as a ripped-off washbasin and radiator — in her ground floor room at Beech Court nursing home in Newland Street, Eynsham.

Hot water started gushing out because of broken pipes and the fire alarm went off as the car started to smoke.

But Amy — who was born in the same year as British actors John Mills and Rex Harrison, and has lived through the Great Depression and two world wars — emerged unscathed despite the shock of being woken from her sleep at about 1am on Saturday. Night staff, alarmed by the noise, rushed to see what had happened and ushered the great-great grandmother to safety.

Yesterday, home matron Glynis Dunbar said it was the second major incident they had coped with in just over a year.

Last summer, the home had to take in elderly residents from the village when an area of Eynsham was evacuated because of explosions in a nearby garden shed.

Ms Dunbar said: "She (Amy) was very lucky. The room was a mess — the windows had been smashed in with glass everywhere.

"She was surrounded by debris.

"She was sleeping at the time and the fact she is blind and quite deaf probably meant she didn't understand just what had happened.

"It is a bedroom for two. If there had been someone else in there, nearer to the wall and window, it could have been much more serious."

Police and fire crews were called to the scene. It is understood the car, a dark blue BMW M5 veered off Newland Street, crashed through a brick wall and into the front of the nursing home, scattering wreckage across the garden.

Police spokesman Vicky Brandon said a man in his 20s was taken to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

A breath test for alcohol was given but at this stage the man had not been arrested, she said.

Mrs Brandon added that officers were investigating whether the same car was involved in an earlier collision with a cyclist in Banbury Road, Oxford.

Anyone with information should contact police on 08458 505505 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.

"I was not there at the time, but when I came in on Saturday morning the damage looked awful," said Ms Dunbar.

"Everybody had gone to bed for the night and it was a shock to them all to hear the noise and then the fire alarm going off."

Amy came to the nursing home eight years ago from Headington in Oxford.

She had lived in the city all her life, and had worked at St Aldate's police station and at the Warneford Hospital, as well as volunteering for the League of Friends at the Churchill Hospital. She has four great-great grandchildren.