This site is dedicated To Richey James Edwards June Gibbons created a private world in which she and her twin sister Jennifer spoke only to each other. She tells Hilton Als how she survived Jennifer's death. A life of my own It is a cold, grey day, the kind of day that Americans, reading English novels, imagine being far more picturesque than the reality. As the train approaches Haverfordwest, a small market town in southwest Wales, I see June Gibbons, the only black person on the platform. She spots me, too, the only black person on the train, and she nods as I disembark. She is wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, black boots and a large blue jacket, in which her thin frame seems to swim. June's face - the face I have already studied in photographs - is long and narrow and fine. She smiles when I introduce myself, exposing sharp teeth stained by tobacco. Almost at once, she tells me, in a muffled, fast voice, that we should hurry into a taxi. Actually, it's more of a command: "Get in the taxi!" I sit in the front seat, next to the driver. We drive through the town: steep hills, shops, children in school uniforms shouting and jostling one another; housing estates where all the houses look the same. June asks about the title of the book I am carrying, In Search of Wales, by HV Morton. "Well, he's found it, then!" she says quickly, to nobody in particular. She laughs, but examines me with the eyes of someone who has learnt how to watch closely. June and Jennifer Gibbons were born at an RAF hospital in Aden, in the Middle East, in 1963. June arrived first, but Jennifer, born 10 minutes later, seemed to be the stronger twin, more alert and physically robust. Their parents were from Barbados: Aubrey tall, handsome and stiff, and Gloria, whose soft eyes gave her a gentle, yielding appearance. The twins - or "twinnies", as Gloria called them - had round cheeks and bows in their hair and winning smiles, and soon they had a baby sister, Rosie, born in 1967, whom they adored. But even as toddlers they could barely speak: three or four words at the most. At school in Devon, where Aubrey had been posted, the girls were taunted mercilessly about their skin colour and their silence. "Eight or nine, we started suffering, and we stopped talking," June told me. "People called us names - we were the only black girls in school. Terrible names. They pulled our hair." The twins soon stopped making eye contact with others, perhaps so as not to have to see themselves judged. They also stopped speaking to their parents and their older siblings. "We made a pact," June explained. "We said we weren't going to speak to anybody. We stopped talking altogether - only us two, in our bedroom upstairs." Aubrey and Gloria could sometimes hear the girls chattering to each other in their room, in a patois that they couldn't understand any more than they understood the girls' silence. In 1974, when the twins were 11, Aubrey was transferred to Haverfordwest, where the bullying at school was so severe that the girls had to be dismissed five minutes early every day to give them a head start for the walk home. "We had a ritual," June said. "We'd kneel by the bed and ask God to forgive our sins. We'd open the Bible and start chanting from it and pray like mad. We'd pray to Him not to let us hurt our family by ignoring them, to give us strength to talk to our mother; our father. We couldn't do it. Hard it was. Too hard." In 1979, for Christmas, Gloria gave June and Jennifer each a red leather-bound diary with a lock, and they began to keep a detailed account of their lives, as part of a programme of "self-improvement". They approached their diaries as literary works, revising and rewriting to create a final version for posterity. At 18, the real world beckoned. They discovered boys, drinking and drugs. "We needed to have a bottle to drink," June told me. "Without the whisky we didn't speak. We reckon that God told us to buy drink, and it worked. We sniffed glue and lighter fluid. We were different then, laughing and talking. We were so relaxed and laid-back." But every time the twins looked up and saw each other; they saw their own peculiar form of desolation staring back at them. They tried to change their looks, sending away to the West Indies for hair and skin creams. They tried magic. Soon they also began to direct their loathing at their surroundings. Rejected by a local gang, they formed a gang of two. They began stealing bicycles and glue, ringing people's doorbells repeatedly. They smashed windows, stole books, drew graffiti on walls. In May 1982 the girls were tried on 16 joint counts of burglary, theft and arson. They pleaded guilty, on the advice of their lawyers, and were ordered to be de-tained at Broadmoor indefinitely. "If we hadn't found a hospital for them," the psychiatrist William Spry reasoned, "they would have gone to prison, and I thought that was the worst possible thing." For weeks, the girls fantasised about Broadmoor, which doctors had described to them in terms more appropriate to an English Eden. "We wanted to get away from our life," June told me. "We thought Broadmoor was going to be like paradise." Days after their arrival, June slipped into a torpor. A few weeks later she attempted suicide. Jennifer attacked a nurse. They were put in separate wards and were denied access to each other for a time. They were 19 when they entered Broadmoor. "Juvenile delinquents get two years in prison," June said. "We got 12 years of hell, because we didn't speak. We had to work hard to get out. We went to the doctor. We said, 'Look, they wanted us to talk, we're talking now.' He said, 'You're not getting out. You're going to be here for 30 years.' We lost hope, really. I wrote a letter to the Queen, asking her to get us out. But we were trapped." June and Jennifer were nearly 30 years old when they were released in 1993. On the bus, Jennifer rested her head on her twin's shoulder and said, "At long last we're out." Less than 12 hours later she was dead. Her heart had been weakened by an undiagnosed inflammation. "We prayed for forgiveness, but, of course, He didn't forgive us," June told me. "He punished us for 12 years. He hated us. He didn't listen to us. We suffered. And, at the end of it all, what does it mean, if she died?" June still takes medication every day and is able to talk, though at times it is difficult to understand her. When she is excited or amused, her speech is rapid and thick. She is 37. Every Tuesday she attends her sister's grave. In the halfway house she is living in when I visit (she has since moved to her own apartment), she proudly shows me one of her drawings, hanging on the door to her room: a girl with braids and a dark face. Underneath the drawing is the name Alison spelt in different-coloured letters. June tells me that she now prefers to be called by her middle name, as she has had so much bad luck with her first name. "That name brought me more than grief. Alison's a fresh start, never suffering." She opens the door to her bedroom with a flourish. "Here is my sanctuary," she says. It's a small room with a large window looking out onto a garden. The bed is large, with a cheap polyester spread covering it, and opposite is a brown easy chair. There is also a television, a wastebasket full of cigarette butts and, against the wall, an electric keyboard. Over tea, she tells me what she wants out of life now: "What I want is to get married and have children. But it's a bit late now. It's funny. All my family are married to white people. All the kids are mixed race. Kinky blond hair and pale skin. I want black kids. I want a Rasta man, with Rasta hair; like Bob Marley. My mum says, 'Oh, no, they're low class - they're not decent people.' But I like them." She laughs, huddling over her teacup, which she holds stiffly in front of her. I realise that she is telling me a fantasy she had about me - and against which I come up short. I have close-cropped hair; no dreadlocks. I registered her slight look of disappointment when we met. We talk about Broadmoor; and I ask her if she did a lot of reading there. Her face lights up. "Oh yeah, my Lord, I read thousands of books in there. I read myself dry in Broadmoor. D H Lawrence, I like him; Oscar Wilde; Dylan Thomas; Emily Brontė; the woman who wrote Frankenstein, Mary Shelley; all the classics. I wrote five books - manuscripts. They're not very professional, though, they're a bit all over the place." "Do you still write?" "It seems to me that as I get older I don't want to write any more," she says. "I don't see the point now. I can communicate by talking now, can't I? I stopped writing diaries way back. I'm a bit lazy now. Brain dead. I can't be bothered to write books." I say: "I wish you would write more." Flirtatiously she shoots back: "Maybe you'll inspire me to write. I could write if I wanted to. I could see the dawn coming and get up and start writing. It's hard work to be a writer; isn't it? I want an easy job, an easy life . . . Do you know something?" she interrupts herself suddenly. "I could sleep for 10 days if I wanted to. I like dreaming. I see my sister in my dreams, talking to me." The name Jennifer means "white love", she adds. "I used to miss her," June says. "Now I've accepted her. She's in me. She makes me stronger. I accept the fact that she's gone now. That took me five years of grieving, crying all the time. Now all my tears are gone, they all dried up inside my eyes . . . I don't get lonely now. I've got her, haven't I?" © The New Yorker 2000 a life our life always together, forever drawing strength from one another two beds, two heads, one mind locked in locked up creating stories inventing life you and me you are me I want to find a part of me that doesn't belong to you a poisoned mind this is our game virgins on the dole tried a little witchcraft trying to be invisible someone is driving you insane it's me stares and signals my perception, your perception, clashing you are me you and me you are me a passing breeze across the sky dreaming separated burning inside this is our war this is our life who will give in you or me a division within and between separated only one should lose I was missing from the world you gave my life back to me this is our life this is our game we once were two we two made one we no more two through life be one June Alison Gibbons "We Two Made One" _September Poems_ 1981 From Psychology Today When Twins Die, Kill, Burn and Love Though it doesn't happen often, occasionally in history a set of mythic twins seem to burst into our awareness, more wedded and bonded than any couple, even darkly so. Some twins live with a passion the rest of us experience only in the almost unbearably intense first flush of romantic love. England's the Gibbons twins are one such pair. Jennifer and June Gibbons were born 35 years ago, the youngest children of Aubrey Gibbons, a West Indian technician for the British Royal Air Force. The girls communicated with each other in a self-made dialect and were elective mutes with the rest of the world. By the time they were 11, they refused to sit in the same room with their parents or siblings. Their mother delivered their meals on a tray and slipped mail under the door. They taught themselves to read, and eventually locked themselves in their bedroom, writing literally millions of words in diaries. Later they lost their virginity to the same boy within a week of each other, triggering jealous rage. Jennifer tried to strangle June with a cord, and June tried to drown Jennifer in a river. When publishers rejected their work, they went on a spree of arson and theft, and were committed to Broadmoor, England's most notorious institution for the criminally insane. "Nobody suffers the way I do," June wrote in her diary "This sister of mine, a dark shadow robbing me of sunlight, is my one and only torment." In another passage, Jennifer described one lying in the bunk bed above her: Her perception was sharper than steel, it sliced through to my own perception. l read her mind, I knew all about her mood. My perception. Her perception...clashing, knowing, cunning, sly." After more than a decade of confinement, they were set free. That same afternoon, Jennifer was rushed to the hospital with viral myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, and that night she died. The pathologist who saw her heart seemed to be speaking poetically of their lethal passion when he described Jennifer's illness as "a fulminating, roaring inflammation with the heart muscle completely destroyed." June, the survivor, has said that she was "born in captivity, trapped in twinship." Eventually, June claims, they began to accept that one must die so the other could be free. Today, June lives in Wales.