Nobody suffers the way I do. 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.
—June Gibbons
Identical twins are something the world has always been fascinated by. Stories go around about twins, separated at birth, coming together and sharing eerie similarities. Other reports of “twinspeak” and various patois shared by those who not only shared their mother’s womb, but their very DNA.
Twins are fascinating. But the Gibbons girls are something else entirely.
From childhood, twins June and Jennifer Gibbons were inseparably linked, bound together as if at the hip in a strange love and obsessive hatred.
Since infancy the Gibbons girls communicated with each other in a strange speeded-up patois-like English, but rarely, if ever, did they speak to the adults. [Their father] Aubrey asked [journalist Marjorie] Wallace to accompany him to visit the twins at a detention center where the girls were held before being transferred to Broadmoor.
The Gibbons twins were massively productive, writing novels, maintaining voluminous notebooks, encoded diaries, typewritten manuscripts, journals written on disused cardboard and multitudes of drawings.
Each girl wrote two to three thousand words a day, two reflections of a similar reality.
Jennifer’s The Pugilist features a physician so eager to save his child’s life that he kills the family dog to obtain a heart for transplant. The dog’s spirit lives on inside the child, eventually obtaining vengeance on the father.
Discomania tells the story of a young woman who comes across a particular local disco that incites its patrons to insane violence.
An attempt to send them to separate boarding schools failed utterly: the twins became catatonic and were unresponsive while parted, so the twins were finally reunited.
When puberty arrived, it did not come gently.
The girls finally discovered boys. The girls lost their virginity; Jennifer first, June a week later to the same boy.
Jennifer tried to strangle June with a radio cord. June attempted to drown Jennifer in the river. They burned down a tractor store in October 1981, injuring a fireman and causing $200,000 worth of damage.
Two weeks after the arson they committed an additional incident of vandalism and attempted arson at the technical college near their home. This time, they were sentenced to a maximum security hospital near London for the criminally insane.
At the age of 29, facing their release from the facility, June and Jennifer made a pact: One of them would have to die in order to set the other one free. Jennifer was the one to tell their confidant, journalist Marjorie Wallace: “Marjorie, I’m going to die. We’ve decided.”
Ten days later, the twins’ doctor in Wales called. The twins had been released, and 10 minutes after Jennifer slumped on June’s shoulder from an acute myocarditis (an inflammation of the heart muscle).
As a postscript of sorts, now freed of their psychological umbilical cord, June has moved past her twin’s death and lives a quiet and independent life.
Via People and The Guardian.