curiophile

The Silent Twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons.

Incredibly, nobody had thought the twins’ silent pact was of real concern until they were 14 years old and attending secondary school. By then the girls seemed beyond reach, locked in an imaginative world of role-playing, diary-writing and drawing during long hours in their bedroom. Only their younger sister, Rosie, had been allowed to penetrate the wall between them and the outside world. Their parents and two older siblings, Greta and David, were excluded.

June and Jennifer were moved to a residential special school, the Eastgate Centre, but their bond strengthened with every failed attempt to tease them out of their silence or separate them.

As the years went on the twins’ love for one another became infused with violence as a struggle for power ensued. “They had these rituals where they decided between them which one would wake up in the morning first, which one would breathe first, and the other one wasn’t allowed to breathe until the first one breathed,” says Wallace. “It was like some sinister childhood game that had gone out of control.” Wallace quickly noticed they would signal to each other with the tiniest flicker of the eye as they moved in painfully slow synchronicity. Ultimately, though, Jennifer was controlling June.