When I left school I planned to be a quantity surveyor but soon realised that I wanted to be an actor and was wasting their time and mine.

I needed a stop-gap job and a friend of mine was a manager in a fish warehouse. Deliveries of fish would come into the warehouse in Manchester and were then sent to the shops.

I was in charge of emergency deliveries and on one occasion we had a call at about lunchtime from Scarborough. They needed fish the next day so I had to get there before the shop closed at 5.30pm.

All the fish were in wet boxes and as I loaded up the Ford van I got soaked. I went home to get changed before setting out, which meant that on the journey I was trying to make up for the time I had lost.

I was driving down an open road at speed when I saw a car in front of me signalling right. I thought he was pulling out after having stopped, and there seemed to be plenty of room to get past him before he did.

But he wasn’t pulling out — he was trying to do a U-turn. He slowly started to block the road and I pulled out further, hoping he would see me. He didn’t.

It got to the point where there was nowhere left for me to go, so I veered to the left to take him on the inside and didn’t quite make it. I clipped his rear end and sent him into a spin while I veered off and applied the emergency brake.

The boxes of fish came cascading forward and opened onto me. I sat there covered with the things. When I opened the door loads of fish just fell onto the road. I must have looked very strange to the old guy in the other car. I had a word with him, but he was useless — he hadn’t looked to see if anyone was coming.

I phoned the warehouse and they sent a replacement van. The driver picked up the fish from the road, packed it in new ice boxes and took it to the shop, leaving me there to wait for the recovery van.

The actor Bernard Hill is best known for his role as Yosser Hughes in Boys from the Blackstuff. He has also appeared in films including The Bounty and Shirley Valentine

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