June and Jennifer Gibbons were born in April 1963 in Yemen, where their father worked with the Royal Air Force. When the twin girls were babies, everything seemed fine. But as they grew older, their parents started to worry. The girls could not talk like other kids their age. They seemed to have their own way of speaking that only they understood. Their father Aubrey said that the girls would make sounds and talk at home, but they were not like other children who could speak normally.
The family moved to Wales in the early 1960s. Things got worse for the twins there. They were the only Black children in their school, and other kids bullied them badly. Many people thought they had created their own language, but June later said it was just English with a very bad speech problem that even their parents could not understand. By the time they were teenagers, they copied each other’s movements, would not read or write in school, and people started calling them the silent twins.
