Early Life
June and Jennifer were the daughters of West Indian immigrants Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons. Gloria was a housewife and Aubrey worked as a technician for the Royal Air Force. Shortly after their birth in Barbados, their family moved to Haverfordwest, Wales. The twin sisters were inseparable, and had speech impediments that made them difficult to understand for people outside their immediate family, and they mixed very little with other children. School was traumatic for them; they were ostracized in the school. Eventually the school administrators had to send them home early each day to avoid being bullied and give them a head start. Their language became even more idiosyncratic at this time - an idioglossia - and became unintelligible to outsiders. They spoke to no one except each other and their younger sister Rose, and became even more isolated.
When they turned 14, after a succession of therapists had tried unsuccessfully to get them to communicate with others, they were sent to separate boarding schools in an attempt to break their isolation. The pair became catatonic and entirely withdrawn when parted.
Read more about this topic: June And Jennifer Gibbons
Famous quotes related to early life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)