The Silent Twins: Now a major motion picture starring Letitia Wright

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June was older than her sister by ten minutes, yet most people believed that Jennifer was the manipulative sister. The twins, who immigrated to England with their parents and three siblings in the early 1960s, grew closer because of the abuse they endured. June: "All through my schooldays I often thought and confessed I was a boy. I got strange feeling I was a boy under all my female assets. It’s as though I’d been a boy first in my life." This is a poem June wrote in 1983 while she was at Broadmoor Asylum, in the full grip of hopelessness and despair, and under the influence of psychotropic drugs prescribed to ensure her compliance: Me and you got the same feelings, nobody gonna tell us to cry for the moon, when we want to cry for the sun."

Tamara Lawrance [l] stars as Jennifer Gibbons and Letitia Wright stars as June Gibbons in director Agnieszka Smoczynska's The Silent Twins. Was this bad? Was it? The writing and word choices were pretty bizarre, the punctuation was odd, the characters don't act anywhere near realistically and I'm not entirely sure any of it made sense. But honestly, it was absolutely fascinating and pretty fun, and that ending was... Very good, actually.WALLACE: I always liked being with them. They would have that wry little sense of humor. They would respond to jokes. Often we would spend our teas together just laughing. SMITH: Marjorie immediately called their doctors, who said they were monitoring the twins and told her not to worry. She just waited, hoping to get a call that the twins had arrived safely at Caswell. Finally, she heard from one of the doctors.

When June and Jennifer Gibbons were born, it was clear to their parents early on that something was unique about them. Or, more accurately, between them. When identical twins, June and Jennifer Gibbons were three they began to reject communication with anyone but each other, and so began a childhood bound together in a strange and secret world. As they grew up, love and hate united to push them to the extreme margins of society and, following a five week spree of vandalism and arson, the silent twins were sentenced to a gruelling twelve-year detention in Broadmoor.I found the book so unusual because it wasn't as unusual as I thought it was going to be. The Sister spends much of their life living life famously unconventional. Living in their silent world, a Kaspar Hauser-esque existence. I thought it was going to be written from a weird interpretation of life. To me, it was like it was written by any teenager, I was surprised she knew 'the john' was slang for toilet. It's strangely competent about what emotions people have when they didn’t share their emotions with the outside world. I found this book to be interesting, sad and a little creepy to read. This is the story of June and Jennifer gibbons, identical twins living in the UK. They did not communicate with anyone, only each other. They had a secret language and grew up to commit multiple crimes. They eventually would serve time in prison. This book was originally published in 1986 and it only focuses on the first 20yrs of their lives. It would have been nice if the author did a follow up book about these girls.

Wallace, one of the only people June and Jennifer would talk to, ended up reporting extensively on the behavior that allegedly spooked the Broadmoor staff. The twins would alternate which one of them would eat food while the other one went hungry. For a time they were separated, and staff would discover that both girls, though kept in cells far apart from one another, were motionless, frozen in the exact same position. WALLACE: I took my daughter in, and we went through all the doors and then we went into the place where the visitors were allowed to have tea. And we had quite a jolly conversation to begin with. And then suddenly, in the middle of the conversation, Jennifer said, Marjorie, Marjorie, I'm going to have to die, and I sort of laughed. I sort of said what? Don't be silly. You're 31 years old. You know, you're just about to be freed from Broadmoor. Why are you going to have to die? You're not ill. And she said, because we've decided. At that point, I got very, very frightened because I could see that they meant it. And then they said, we have made a pact. Jennifer has got to die because they said the day that they left Broadmoor, the day that they were free from the secure hospital, one of them would have to give up their life to really enable the other one to be free. I later found out that they had been quarreling violently - from the staff at Broadmoor - about who was going to die. And then they passed over a little pine that they'd written, which was (reading) that two is your laughing, that two is your smiling and now I'm dead, that too is your crying. However, June refused to cooperate and stopped physically moving, spending most of her time lying in bed at her residential care unit. But i think that was one of the happiest days i ever had… those don’t come by too often.’ ‘It was always like July 4th in those days.’”I'll tell you what fazes me: the fact that this book is labelled "outsider" literature and hasn't been re-published, while the likes of "Twilight" and "50 Shades" are actually sold as books. WALLACE: I saw their parents and then they took me upstairs, and they showed me in the bedroom lots of bean bags filled with writings - exercise books. And what I discovered was that while they had been in that room alone, they had been teaching themselves to write. And I put them in the boot of the car and took them home. And I couldn't believe this, that these girls, to the outside world, hadn't spoken and had been dismissed as being zombies, had this rich imaginative life. Their behaviour took another unexpected turn in October 1981, when they embarked on a five-week spree committing vandalism, burglary, and arson. Leah Mondesir Simmons and Eva-Arianna Baxter as the young June and Jennifer. Photograph: Courtesy of Jakub Kijowski/Focus Features