They had also developed other peculiarities, such as refusing to communicate with virtually any outsiders, refusing to read or write in school, and mirroring each other’s actions. As the bullying got worse, school officials began releasing the girls early, in the hopes that they could sneak out and avoid being harassed.īy the time the girls were teenagers, their language had become unintelligible to anyone else. Being the only Black children in their elementary school made them the target of relentless bullying, which only deepened their dependency on each other. It wasn’t only a singular dialect that kept the girls isolated. YouTube The “silent twins” in elementary school. The two would come to be known as the “silent twins” for their unwillingness to communicate with anyone except for each other. Though the family spoke English at home, young June and Jennifer Gibbons began to speak another language, believed to be a sped-up version of Bajan Creole.
The Gibbons family was originally from Barbados and had immigrated to Great Britain in the early 1960s. “In the home, they’d talk, make sounds, and all that, but we knew that they weren’t quite like, you know, normal children, talking readily,” their father Aubrey recalled. Not only were they far behind their peers in regard to language skills, but they were also unusually inseparable, and the two girls seemed to have a private language that only they could understand. Not long after their girls hit speaking age, Gloria and Aubrey Gibbons realized that their twin daughters were different. Their births were not unusual, nor were their dispositions as infants, but soon enough, their parents began to see that June and Jennifer Gibbons were not like other girls - and it wouldn’t be until one of the twins met her untimely death that any sense of normalcy would be reclaimed. In April of 1963 at the military hospital in Aden, Yemen, a pair of twin girls were born. YouTube June and Jennifer Gibbons, aka the “silent twins,” as young girls.
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