The Silent Twins There is no way to explain the bizarre saga of England`s silent twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons, who carried their ferocious fight for identity into madness and crime. Perhaps the twins` battle began 25 years ago in their mother`s womb when, randomly, a single fertilized egg split, and two distinct yet genetically identical beings were created. Something went terribly wrong, because June and Jennifer have never been whole. From infancy on, they tuned out the world, utterly refusing to talk to anyone except themselves. Medical science calls them elective mutes. As they grew up, the twins became trapped by their silence, isolated by weirdness and bonded by their incompleteness. Yet they also possessed surprising literary gifts and as writers understood their plight quite well. ``Nobody suffers the way I do,`` June Gibbons wrote in her diary. ``Not with a sister. With a husband-yes. With a wife-yes. With a child-yes. But this sister of mine, a dark shadow robbing me of sunlight, is my one and only torment.`` As the youngest of five children of Aubrey Gibbons, a West Indian technician for the British Royal Air Force and his wife, Gloria, the girls communicated only with each other in anxious, staccato bursts of a made-up English dialect. They flatly refused to speak to their parents and others who sought to enter their closed lives. Most twins are able to differentiate, to become individuals while still maintaining the unique closeness of the twin bond. Many twins share private languages, but the Gibbons twins never outgrew theirs. ``It was more comfortable just nodding heads,`` wrote June. ``Words seemed too much; if we were suddenly to talk, it would be too much of a surprise.`` As they passed through childhood, their family was usually on the move, causing the twins to rely on each other even more. In schools they were taunted because of their color as well as their silence. Confused teachers threw up their hands. They told the parents that the twins would outgrow their odd behavior, but they never did. By the time they were 11 years old, they refused to sit in the same room with or speak to their parents and siblings. If they wished to watch a certain TV show, they would leave a note for their parents, asking that the door to the TV room be left open. Then they would sit on the stairs, watching the show through the doorway. If an older brother or sister came in, they`d scurry back upstairs. In public, the twins acted like zombies, like automatons-they even moved in perfect synchrony and would goose-step silently through town. If they felt threatened, they froze in catatonia, making their bodies stiff as boards. They were so attuned to each other that if they went horseback riding and one fell off, the other immediately would fall off, too. After the family settled near an air base in the dreary little Welsh town of Haverford West, the girls locked themselves away in their bunk bedroom and grew obsessed with the idea of becoming famous novelists. They gushed millions of words into diaries, poems, stories, novels and Bronte-like ultraminiature books that could only be deciphered with a magnifying glass. When publishers rejected their work, they started to commit crimes. After a heedless spree of arson and petty theft followed by a quick trial in 1982, they were committed ``without limit of time`` to Broadmoor, England`s most notorious institution for the criminally violent insane, where they remain today.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Aug 2013 03:38:01 +0000
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