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 The pair became catatonic and entirely withdrawn when parted.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 you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandma’s early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if you’ve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)
“What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person.... They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)