THE
P RTAL
February 2019
Page 18
Two mins from the Skripals’!
Jackie Ottaway and Ronald Crane visit Fr Keith Robinson
W e did
not need two Russian assassins to tell us that Salisbury is a beautiful city with a fine cathedral.
As readers of T he P ortal will know, we have a thriving Ordinariate Group there. If you look back in
our archive, you will find reports of a couple of visits to the group in Salisbury.
What you may not know is that the Group Pastor,
Fr Keith Robinson and his wife Christine, live just
two minutes walk from the Skripals’ house. On the
day we visited, it was announced in the media that
the authorities were removing the roof timbers of that
house in case of contamination.
There was great danger in using such a potent agent as
the Russian-developed Novichok in an attempt to kill
Sergei Skripal. This substance was, it seems, smeared
upon the door knob of his house. He and his daughter,
Yulia, were both seriously affected, as were a number of
others, including a Police Officer. Later, Charlie Rowley
found the bottle of nerve agent and, thinking it was
perfume, presented it to his partner Dawn Sturgess.
She tragically died, whilst he was seriously ill.
It all kicked-off on 4 th March 2018. From that date,
Salisbury changed from a quiet County City to a
place no one wanted to visit. Visitors were afraid,
and naturally so, but what of the people of Salisbury
themselves?
Fr Keith told us, “Yes, well it was an extraordinary
shock really because Salisbury is a self-contained
place; it’s far enough away from London to have its
own life which isn’t dependent on London. It’s a fairly
quiet place; a beautiful city, a cathedral city, and is not
the kind of place where these things happen.
“I think that to begin with we could hardly believe
what we were being told. In fact, it took a long time
to believe what we were being told, but what we were
told was reinforced immediately by those very parts of
the city where we lived and moved and had our being,
being barricaded off, not only so that we couldn’t be in
them but also so that we couldn’t even see into them.
There are places in the centre of the city where we
normally walk still out of bounds. One large property
in the city centre, the pub which they visited, is still
boarded up and no one seems to know what’s going to
happen.
Photograph: Robert Roy - www.roblog.com
so much we were not told, which is why we had so
many theories. You know how it is; it seemed to be
an invisible kind of gloopy stuff which they could put
on, which you could hardly see so you couldn’t notice.
They could put it on door handles. It’s so bizarre and
the further it went on the more bizarre it seemed to
become, and the house is just at the end of this street.”
“That’s where it was, apparently on the door handle.
It is where they picked it up. The Skripals’ house is
in a little street which runs off the end of our road.
It was closed off for six months with police. That was
the other thing; the police presence was phenomenal.
We just don’t have enough local police, so they were
coming from all over the country.
“They were being replaced perhaps every week so
if you spoke to them, which we tended to do because
we thought what a boring job just standing there, even
through the snow, night and day, just to stop people
going in or out. We know somebody who lives in
“I think what we would understand is it’s the last that street and they had to show their ID every time
place to be cleaned up because no one quite knew what they went in or out, which seems an extreme course
the substance was and we now understand. There was of action to take. Then as you begin to realise how