I was reading The Cross of Christ by John Stott for my 1986 entry in A Century of Books, but it’s a big book and felt too important a read to rush through for the sake of a reading challenge. And so I turned to the other 1986 books waiting on my shelves – it turns out I have a lot, and I was toying with Margaret Forster, Henrietta Garnett, Penelope Fitzgerald, Diana Athill, Quentin Bell, Barbara Pym… but settled, in the end, of The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace.
I don’t remember exactly the conversation that led to this, but Kim (of Reading Matters) kindly sent me her copy back in 2012 – I think perhaps the twins were mentioned in an Oliver Sacks book? – and it’s been waiting patiently until then. The edition is a 1998 reprint, including a new chapter, and is clearly marketed to fit into the post-David-Pelzer proliferation of misery memoirs. The tagline – ‘the harrowing true story of sisters locked in a shocking childhood pact’ – is nonsense that does the sensitive book a disservice.
June and Jennifer Gibbons are the twins of the title, born in Yemen and growing up in Haverfordwest in Wales (a pretty miserable town, I have to say, having gone there a few years ago). The Gibbons were a loving family, excited to add to their number – and, having moved to Wales, were dealing well with the tensions that came from being one the few black families in their 1960s community. But as the girls grew older, they were clearly different from their family and from local families. They were more or less elective mutes – speaking to each other in words so fast and curiously stressed that it sounded like another language, but never speaking to their parents or older siblings. Their younger sister was the exception to the rule.
Baffling teachers, June and Jennifer didn’t seem to match any evident diagnosis – and, indeed, Wallace doesn’t attempt to give them a diagnosis. Trapped in a world of their own, spending hours in their bedroom with their dolls and stories as they grew older, they were an enigma to the world at large. Limp and uncommunicative in public, they clearly had a ferociously active sororal relationship. They also wrote prolifically – fiction (which they furtively sent off to publishers, and eventually self-published) but also diaries. Wallace uses these diaries – which they wrote for years, covering enormous quantities of pages in tiny handwriting, to recreate their experiences. Often we see things from their perspective in the narrative, with the diaries silently referenced – most movingly when they deal with how much June and Jennifer love their family, even while never expressing it or communicating with them at all.
In their later teens, things changed. They start stalking some brothers. They lose their virginities with frantic determination. And they go on a spree of ill-concealed burglary and arson that will lead to them going to court – and, ultimately, Broadmoor. On a life sentence (of which they served eleven years), for crimes that usually warranted a few months’ sentence.
It is a fascinating tale, and Wallace does her best to show us the deeply complex relationship between June and Jennifer – drawing from the diaries, because of how little she or anybody else can see of it from the outside. And the power dynamics and repressions behind those silent exteriors were truly extraordinary.
Time and again the twins returned to this theme. They saw themselves as the ultimate unhappy couple, Jennifer as the quirky, irascible husband, June the victim wife, and although they switched roles in most of their other games, in this they remained consistent.
The ‘silent’ of the title isn’t quite true. As they got older, they spoke more – and seemed to have held relatively normal conversations with the teenagers they became involved with, as well as answering Wallace’s questions at least at times. But their twin relationship certainly plays into some of the stereotypes associated with twins in the popular consciousness – that we inhabit a world apart, unknowable to outsiders, and that the relationship might be unhealthy or dangerous. I can’t count the number of times people have asked me if Colin and I have a secret language, or if we can feel each other’s pain, or communicate psychically. Or, more generally, what it’s like to be a twin. Well, as I’ve said before, I can’t imagine what it’s like not to be a twin – but I also can’t imagine what it’s like to be in the closed and claustrophobic world June and Jennifer inhabited. My relationship with Colin is the most special in my life, and I don’t doubt that there are dynamics there that no other relationship could have, but it’s definitely not the curious mix of passionate hatred, obsessive love, and controlling fear that the Gibbons had. Theirs is truly a unique existence.
As for the writing – I think Wallace used the diaries well, and told their story without being unduly melodramatic. Indeed, I found the whole thing curiously sedated. It’s not bad writing by any means, but having discovered Janet Malcolm and Julie Salamon this year, I have new high standards for this variety of non-fiction. Wallace felt a bit unambitious in the way she wrote – though you could also argue that she was letting the extraordinary circumstances tell their own story. And they did do that, but I think I’d have valued the book even more if there was a little more to the writing.
I’m glad to have finally read it – thank you, Kim!