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 The pair became catatonic and entirely withdrawn when parted.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 containing the words early and/or life:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)