The mother of Diane Williams, the girls’ only friend at the time, remembered them as “beautifully dressed, always clean and tidy” (a dubious compliment—the implication being that one expected them to be dirty). Perhaps Diane appealed to June and Jennifer because she was a romantic figure: sickly and sympathetic and religious. They were religious, too. “We had a ritual,” June told me. “We’d kneel down 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 1976, John Rees, a school medical officer, came to Haverfordwest to vaccinate the students against tuberculosis. When he later spoke to Marjorie Wallace, the author of a 1986 book, “The Silent Twins,” which is out of print in the United States but remains the principal source of information about the girls, he described a parade of white arms and then, suddenly, a black one. He tried to prepare what he called “the little Negress” who stood in front of him for the sting of inoculation, but she seemed to be in a trance, nearly lifeless, doll-like. He rubbed a little alcohol on her upper arm and vaccinated her. Soon she was followed by an identical black girl, who also did not react to the needle. Rees was disturbed by their behavior and baffled by the school’s headmaster when he asked him about it: the headmaster didn’t seem to think that the girls were especially troubled. That is, they weren’t trouble, the only real barometer then for colored students’ behavior.

Rees referred the case to Evan Davies, the consultant child psychiatrist for the region. Davies tried to talk to the twins, but they would not respond. He was unable to tell them apart. “Treatment under these circumstances presents a considerable challenge which I am reluctant to accept,” he wrote to Rees. Instead, he referred the girls to Ann Treharne, the chief speech therapist at Haverfordwest’s Withybush Hospital, where they began treatment in February, 1977. They almost never spoke to Treharne or to each other in front of her, but they did agree to read aloud, onto tape, after she had left the room. Listening to the tapes, Treharne discovered that the twins’ “secret language” was actually a mixture of Barbadian slang and English, spoken very quickly. The girls had West Indian accents and were hampered by palatal fricatives—for the “s” sound they would say “sh,” for instance. When she was in the room, Treharne sensed that June wanted to speak to her and was stopped only by eye signals from Jennifer, who appeared to control June’s actions. (June called this form of communication “eye language.”) Jennifer “sat there with an expressionless gaze, but I felt her power,” Treharne told Wallace. “The thought entered my mind that June was possessed by her twin.”

Rees, working with Evans and Tim Thomas, an educational psychologist who had been recruited to the Gibbons case, decided that the girls should be transferred to the Eastgate Centre for Special Education, in Pembroke, eight miles away, where an instructor named Cathy Arthur was put in charge of them. Aubrey and Gloria did not interfere in the decisions that were made for their daughters; they felt they had to trust the British authorities, who presumably knew better than they did. “We were never, like, consulted at any time,” Aubrey told Lichtenstein. “At no time were we called and said, ‘Well, these children are not doing as well as they should,’ you know. Before we knew it, they were into Eastgate, and we just had to toe the line, as it were.”

At Eastgate, the girls fared little better than they had at their previous schools. They had therapy sessions with Tim Thomas, but they responded with the same stiffness and downcast eyes that had, by then, thrown a pall over their family dinners, where their muteness dominated everything and everyone and often drove their older sister, Greta, to tears. The twins attended Greta’s wedding, in 1978, but refused to join in the festivities. Thomas, in an interview for Lichtenstein’s documentary, said that when he first met the twins “there was a tremendous sort of novelty value” to them. But that interest quickly turned to anger. “ ‘Damn insolence’ was an expression that was once used in relation to the girls,” Thomas recalled. “It was understandable in the sense you’ve got people there sitting in front of you who say nothing—you are getting animated about a particular lesson and there is absolutely no feedback. It’s quite threatening, in a way.”

In late 1977, Thomas and Arthur, unable to come up with any productive form of treatment, proposed to their colleagues that the fourteen-year-old girls be separated: Jennifer would remain at Eastgate and June would be sent to live at St. David’s Adolescent Unit, thirty miles away, where Evan Davies was in residence. This was an aggressive measure, presumably intended to help the twins establish distinct personalities, and it caused a certain amount of disharmony among the Eastgate staff. “We were trapped, really, because if they went on as they were, what sort of future would they have—not being able to communicate?” Thomas told me. “There was one group of us that said we should separate them, because it would give them the opportunity to see if they survive. We felt it was an incredibly controlled situation, and we didn’t know who was exercising the control, June or Jennifer.”

The task of telling the girls about the plan fell to Thomas. Although the twins had toyed with the idea of separation before—sometimes writing notes asking for one of them to be sent to Barbados, one to America—the reality of it terrified them. Within moments, they were screaming and hitting each other. Jennifer dug her nails into June’s cheek. June pulled a chunk of hair out of Jennifer’s head. They chased each other out of Thomas’s office, shrieking, and had to be forcibly parted.

Suddenly, they could talk—or would talk. They telephoned Thomas and other staff members at Eastgate, promising to speak if they were allowed to stay together. “They talked to me on the phone for a long time, saying, ‘Everything will be fine. We’ll talk to you tomorrow.’ But nothing happened,” Thomas told me. “We would walk in the next day and nothing, not a flicker.” In March, 1978, the separation was carried out. But at St. David’s June fell into such despair that she stopped moving almost entirely. It once took two people to get her out of bed, and then all they could do was prop her against a wall; her body was as stiff and heavy as a corpse.

Virginia and Grace Kennedy (the subject of a powerful film-essay, “Poto and Cabengo,” by Jean-Pierre Gorin) were twins born in California in the nineteen-seventies, who developed a language that their social workers and speech therapists couldn’t understand. They were sent to separate schools as children and successfully “socialized.” But it was perhaps too late to teach the teen-age Gibbons twins any kind of existence other than the one now dictated by their imaginations. Even as they struggled to become themselves, they could not live without each other. “You are Jennifer. You are me,” Jennifer would say over the years, when she felt her sister pulling away from their bond. “I am June. I am June,” her sister would cry out in anguished response. “One day, she’d wake up and be me, and one day I would wake up and be her,” June told Lichtenstein. “And we used to say to each other, ‘Give me back myself. If you give me back myself I’ll give you back yourself.’ ” Needless to say, the separation was a failure, at least from the standpoint of “rehabilitation.” June was sent back to Eastgate, and by the winter of 1979, when they were sixteen, both girls had left school forever and were on the dole.