The Silent Twins - Jennifer and June Gibbons

[riot_star]

I've just finished reading the book by Marjorie Wallace, and I am just fascinated by their story at the moment. My Grandad said that there was a documentary on about them a few years back, has anybody seen it? Does anybody know where I can see it?

Also whilst I was looking I found that there was an opera about them in 2007 called 'Speechless'.

[StandAndStare]

did you see there are London dates to be announced for autumn 2011? Should be interesting.

[UEF]

A documentary provided the direct inspiration for the song. It was one of Nicky's grand "let's see what's on the telly" songs in the same vane as SYMM or perhaps LRS

[Deets]

Originally Posted by UEF

A documentary provided the direct inspiration for the song. It was one of Nicky's grand "let's see what's on the telly" songs in the same vane as SYMM or perhaps LRS

yes, I thought it was a documentary that inspired Nicky to write the song, I'm sure he mentions this in one of old NME's.
The story's incredible but I don't like Tsunami.

[raven]

The documentary was shown back around 1994 - twas that that led me to the book. Was stupidly happy when Nicky wrote a song about them but of course they were from Wales.
The doc was on the BBC & it has been repeated but not for quite a long time. Shame it wasn't on 4 as it'd have probably been up on 4 OD now.
There was an interview with June published back in 2000 in the Sunday Times reprinted there from the New Yorker which I've a paper copy of & after searching about I've found it on some other random Manics site. Apart from this she seems to have kept away from the media even after the opera appeared 2 or 3 years back. Wonder what she would have made of an opera based on her life? Bizarre


June Gibbons created a private world in which she and her twin sister
Jennifer spoke only to each other. She tells Hilton Als how she survived
Jennifer's death.


A life of my own

It is a cold, grey day, the kind of day that Americans, reading English novels,
imagine being far more picturesque than the reality. As the train approaches
Haverfordwest, a small market town in southwest Wales, I see June Gibbons, the
only black person on the platform. She spots me, too, the only black person on
the train, and she nods as I disembark. She is wearing jeans and a white
T-shirt, black boots and a large blue jacket, in which her thin frame seems to
swim.

June's face - the face I have already studied in photographs - is long and
narrow and fine. She smiles when I introduce myself, exposing sharp teeth
stained by tobacco. Almost at once, she tells me, in a muffled, fast voice, that
we should hurry into a taxi. Actually, it's more of a command: "Get in the
taxi!" I sit in the front seat, next to the driver.

We drive through the town: steep hills, shops, children in school uniforms
shouting and jostling one another; housing estates where all the houses look the
same. June asks about the title of the book I am carrying, In Search of Wales,
by HV Morton. "Well, he's found it, then!" she says quickly, to nobody in
particular. She laughs, but examines me with the eyes of someone who has learnt
how to watch closely.

June and Jennifer Gibbons were born at an RAF hospital in Aden, in the Middle
East, in 1963. June arrived first, but Jennifer, born 10 minutes later, seemed
to be the stronger twin, more alert and physically robust. Their parents were
from Barbados: Aubrey tall, handsome and stiff, and Gloria, whose soft eyes gave
her a gentle, yielding appearance.

The twins - or "twinnies", as Gloria called them - had round cheeks and bows in
their hair and winning smiles, and soon they had a baby sister, Rosie, born in
1967, whom they adored. But even as toddlers they could barely speak: three or
four words at the most.

At school in Devon, where Aubrey had been posted, the girls were taunted
mercilessly about their skin colour and their silence. "Eight or nine, we
started suffering, and we stopped talking," June told me. "People called us
names - we were the only black girls in school. Terrible names. They pulled our
hair." The twins soon stopped making eye contact with others, perhaps so as not
to have to see themselves judged.

They also stopped speaking to their parents and their older siblings. "We made a
pact," June explained. "We said we weren't going to speak to anybody. We stopped
talking altogether - only us two, in our bedroom upstairs."

Aubrey and Gloria could sometimes hear the girls chattering to each other in
their room, in a patois that they couldn't understand any more than they
understood the girls' silence.

In 1974, when the twins were 11, Aubrey was transferred to Haverfordwest, where
the bullying at school was so severe that the girls had to be dismissed five
minutes early every day to give them a head start for the walk home. "We had a
ritual," June said. "We'd kneel by the bed and ask God to forgive our sins. We'd
open the Bible and start chanting from it and pray like mad. We'd pray to Him
not to let us hurt our family by ignoring them, to give us strength to talk to
our mother; our father. We couldn't do it. Hard it was. Too hard."

In 1979, for Christmas, Gloria gave June and Jennifer each a red leather-bound
diary with a lock, and they began to keep a detailed account of their lives, as
part of a programme of "self-improvement". They approached their diaries as
literary works, revising and rewriting to create a final version for posterity.

At 18, the real world beckoned. They discovered boys, drinking and drugs. "We
needed to have a bottle to drink," June told me. "Without the whisky we didn't
speak. We reckon that God told us to buy drink, and it worked. We sniffed glue
and lighter fluid. We were different then, laughing and talking. We were so
relaxed and laid-back." But every time the twins looked up and saw each other;
they saw their own peculiar form of desolation staring back at them. They tried
to change their looks, sending away to the West Indies for hair and skin creams.
They tried magic.

Soon they also began to direct their loathing at their surroundings. Rejected by
a local gang, they formed a gang of two. They began stealing bicycles and glue,
ringing people's doorbells repeatedly. They smashed windows, stole books, drew
graffiti on walls.

In May 1982 the girls were tried on 16 joint counts of burglary, theft and
arson. They pleaded guilty, on the advice of their lawyers, and were ordered to
be de-tained at Broadmoor indefinitely.

"If we hadn't found a hospital for them," the psychiatrist William Spry
reasoned, "they would have gone to prison, and I thought that was the worst
possible thing."

For weeks, the girls fantasised about Broadmoor, which doctors had described to
them in terms more appropriate to an English Eden. "We wanted to get away from
our life," June told me. "We thought Broadmoor was going to be like paradise."
Days after their arrival, June slipped into a torpor. A few weeks later she
attempted suicide. Jennifer attacked a nurse. They were put in separate wards
and were denied access to each other for a time. They were 19 when they entered
Broadmoor.

"Juvenile delinquents get two years in prison," June said. "We got 12 years of
hell, because we didn't speak. We had to work hard to get out. We went to the
doctor. We said, 'Look, they wanted us to talk, we're talking now.' He said,
'You're not getting out. You're going to be here for 30 years.' We lost hope,
really. I wrote a letter to the Queen, asking her to get us out. But we were
trapped."

June and Jennifer were nearly 30 years old when they were released in 1993. On
the bus, Jennifer rested her head on her twin's shoulder and said, "At long last
we're out." Less than 12 hours later she was dead. Her heart had been weakened
by an undiagnosed inflammation. "We prayed for forgiveness, but, of course, He
didn't forgive us," June told me. "He punished us for 12 years. He hated us. He
didn't listen to us. We suffered. And, at the end of it all, what does it mean,
if she died?"

June still takes medication every day and is able to talk, though at times it is
difficult to understand her. When she is excited or amused, her speech is rapid
and thick. She is 37. Every Tuesday she attends her sister's grave. In the
halfway house she is living in when I visit (she has since moved to her own
apartment), she proudly shows me one of her drawings, hanging on the door to her
room: a girl with braids and a dark face. Underneath the drawing is the name
Alison spelt in different-coloured letters. June tells me that she now prefers
to be called by her middle name, as she has had so much bad luck with her first
name.

"That name brought me more than grief. Alison's a fresh start, never suffering."
She opens the door to her bedroom with a flourish. "Here is my sanctuary," she
says. It's a small room with a large window looking out onto a garden. The bed
is large, with a cheap polyester spread covering it, and opposite is a brown
easy chair. There is also a television, a wastebasket full of cigarette butts
and, against the wall, an electric keyboard.

Over tea, she tells me what she wants out of life now: "What I want is to get
married and have children. But it's a bit late now. It's funny. All my family
are married to white people. All the kids are mixed race. Kinky blond hair and
pale skin. I want black kids. I want a Rasta man, with Rasta hair; like Bob
Marley. My mum says, 'Oh, no, they're low class - they're not decent people.'
But I like them."

She laughs, huddling over her teacup, which she holds stiffly in front of her. I
realise that she is telling me a fantasy she had about me - and against which I
come up short. I have close-cropped hair; no dreadlocks. I registered her slight
look of disappointment when we met.

We talk about Broadmoor; and I ask her if she did a lot of reading there. Her
face lights up. "Oh yeah, my Lord, I read thousands of books in there. I read
myself dry in Broadmoor. D H Lawrence, I like him; Oscar Wilde; Dylan Thomas;
Emily Brontë; the woman who wrote Frankenstein, Mary Shelley; all the classics.
I wrote five books - manuscripts. They're not very professional, though, they're
a bit all over the place."

"Do you still write?"

"It seems to me that as I get older I don't want to write any more," she says.
"I don't see the point now. I can communicate by talking now, can't I? I stopped
writing diaries way back. I'm a bit lazy now. Brain dead. I can't be bothered to
write books."

I say: "I wish you would write more."

Flirtatiously she shoots back: "Maybe you'll inspire me to write. I could write
if I wanted to. I could see the dawn coming and get up and start writing. It's
hard work to be a writer; isn't it? I want an easy job, an easy life . . . Do
you know something?" she interrupts herself suddenly. "I could sleep for 10 days
if I wanted to. I like dreaming. I see my sister in my dreams, talking to me."

The name Jennifer means "white love", she adds. "I used to miss her," June says.
"Now I've accepted her. She's in me. She makes me stronger. I accept the fact
that she's gone now. That took me five years of grieving, crying all the time.
Now all my tears are gone, they all dried up inside my eyes . . . I don't get
lonely now. I've got her, haven't I?"

© The New Yorker 2000

[riot_star]

Originally Posted by StandAndStare

did you see there are London dates to be announced for autumn 2011? Should be interesting.

I didn't see that no, I might look into that!

Thanks raven, it's a very interesting read.

I am hoping that it will be re-shown at some point, as I would really like to see it. I also thought the same about the opera, it's just such a weird choice really. It would be interesting to hear what she thought of it.

[starryknight]

Think it was called The Silent Twin Without My Shadow and was part of the Inside Story series (September 1994).

[starryknight]

Lovely article to read Raven - Thanks for the post

[hibernatus]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0311808/

[riot_star]

I've decided to do our next College project (documentary) about the Silent Twins. My idea is to tell their story whilst at the same time I interview my Grandma and her twin about what it's like to have a relationship like that.

[helvissa]

That sounds interesting!

[riot_star]

Originally Posted by helvissa

That sounds interesting!

Thanks! If I don't get stuck with somebody who wants to do a documentary on JLS, I'll post up the finished product on Youtube.

I haven't chosen any of the subjects for the assignments we've done so far, so I'm going to do it dammit!

[helvissa]

You should, it sounds interesting!

My brother hasn't spoken for nearly year - so he's not an ideal interview candidate, is he, if he won't speak! He's got special needs and depression - apparently it's fairly common that if someone has special needs and ends up depressed, they won't speak. But no one can tell us how long it'll go on for or if it'll ever end. He doesn't have a twin though so it's not really the same thing.

[riot_star]

Originally Posted by helvissa

You should, it sounds interesting!

My brother hasn't spoken for nearly year - so he's not an ideal interview candidate, is he, if he won't speak! He's got special needs and depression - apparently it's fairly common that if someone has special needs and ends up depressed, they won't speak. But no one can tell us how long it'll go on for or if it'll ever end. He doesn't have a twin though so it's not really the same thing.

I'm sorry to hear that, hopefully his silence won't be for much longer.

Not really the same in that respect. My Grandma was saying when her twin was pregnant Grandma had dizzy spells and felt sick all the time, as soon as she gave birth Grandma felt fine again. They are just freaks

[helvissa]

Originally Posted by riot_star

I'm sorry to hear that, hopefully his silence won't be for much longer.

Not really the same in that respect. My Grandma was saying when her twin was pregnant Grandma had dizzy spells and felt sick all the time, as soon as she gave birth Grandma felt fine again. They are just freaks

Woweee, that's awesome!

Yeah, hopefully he won't carry on with it for much longer. He did laugh the other day, which makes a nice change.