June Gibbons

The couple also had three other children: Greta was born in 1957, David was born in 1959, and Rosie was born in 1967.

The Gibbons family moved from Barbados to the United Kingdom in the early 1960s, as part of the Windrush generation.

Gloria was a housewife and Aubrey worked as a technician for the Royal Air Force.

In 1960, Aubrey went to stay with a relative in Coventry and soon qualified as a staff technician.

Gloria followed, with Greta and David, several months later.

June Gibbons (born 11 April 1963 ) and Jennifer Gibbons (11 April 1963 – 9 March 1993) were identical twins who grew up in Wales.

They became known as "The Silent Twins", since they only communicated with each other.

They wrote works of fiction.

Both women were admitted to Broadmoor Hospital, where they were held for 11 years.

June and Jennifer were the daughters of Caribbean immigrants Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons.

The twins were born on 11 April 1963, at a military hospital in Aden, Yemen, where their father had been deployed.

The family soon relocated, first to England, and, in 1974, to Haverfordwest, Wales.

The twin sisters were inseparable and their language, a sped-up Bajan Creole, made it difficult for people to understand them.

In 2023, June said, "We had a speech impediment. Our parents couldn't understand a word that we were saying, nobody understood - so we stopped talking."

The Gibbons children were the only black children in the community, and were often ostracized at school.

This proved to be traumatic for the twins, eventually causing their school administrators to dismiss them early each day so that they might avoid bullying.

Their language became even more idiosyncratic at this time.

Soon it was unintelligible to others.

Their language, or idioglossia, qualified as an example of cryptophasia, exemplified by the twins' simultaneous actions, which often mirrored each other.

The twins became increasingly reserved, and eventually spoke to no one except each other and their younger sister Rose.

The girls continued to attend school, although they refused to read or write.

In 1974, a medic administering vaccinations at the school noted their impassive behaviour and notified a child psychologist.

The twins began seeing a succession of therapists who tried unsuccessfully to get them to communicate with others.

They were sent to separate boarding schools in an attempt to break their isolation, but the pair became catatonic and entirely withdrawn when parted.

When they were reunited, the two spent several years isolating themselves in their bedroom, engaged in elaborate plays with dolls.

They created many plays and stories in a sort of soap opera style, reading some of them aloud on tape as gifts for their sister Rose.

Inspired by a pair of gift diaries on Christmas 1979, they began their writing careers.

They sent away for a mail order course in creative writing, and each kept an extensive diary and wrote a number of stories, poems and novels.

Set primarily in the United States and particularly in Malibu, California, the stories involve young men and women who exhibit strange and often criminal behaviour.

June wrote a novel titled The Pepsi-Cola Addict, in which the high-school hero is seduced by a teacher, then sent away to a reformatory where a homosexual guard makes a play for him.

The two girls pooled together their unemployment benefits in order to get the novel published by a vanity press.

This is the only accessible work by either of the Gibbons sisters, which remained unavailable for purchase and held in only five libraries in the world until October 2022, when it was republished as a limited edition print by Cashen's Gap.

It was also published as a paperback in May 2023 by Strange Attractor.

Their other attempts to publish novels and stories were unsuccessful, although Cashen's Gap is planning future releases by June and Jennifer Gibbons.

In Jennifer's The Pugilist, a physician is so eager to save his child's life that he kills the family dog to obtain its heart for a transplant.

The dog's spirit lives on in the child and ultimately has its revenge against the father.

Jennifer also wrote Discomania, the story of a young woman who discovers that the atmosphere of a local disco incites patrons to insane violence.

She followed up with The Taxi-Driver's Son, a radio play called Postman and Postwoman, and several short stories.

June Gibbons is considered to be an outsider writer.

In their later teenage years, the twins began using drugs and alcohol.