The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins Read Online Free

she will not at any time hereafter molest or in any way annoy the said Mary Hilton or make any claim whatever against her in respect of the said children.
    3. The said Kate Skinner agrees that if at any time hereafter she shall do anything contrary to the provisions of this agreement she will pay to the said Mary Hilton as liquidated damages and not by way of penalty, the sum of tenshillings for every week which the said Mary Hilton shall have had the care, custody and control of the children.
    As witness the hand of the said parties the day and year first above written.
    The document was signed by Kate Skinner and Mary Hilton and bore the signatures of two witnesses, those of Kate’s mother, Mary Ann Skinner, and F. Webb, an employee, most likely a secretary, of the law firm of J. G. Bramhall.
    If, as some evidence suggests, it was Edward Andress’s son, Frederick, who fathered the twins, then his father’s newspaper, the
Brighton Times
, should have had the inside track on the story. In fact, it was another newspaper, the
Brighton Herald
, that broke the news. The
Herald’s
account could hardly be viewed as a scoop. The twins were already six weeks old when the
Herald’s
front page story appeared on March 22, 1908. To the relief of the Skinner family, the account did not refer to Kate by name but instead referred to the mother only as a “servant girl.” The papers report appeared under a two-tiered headline:
    BRIGHTON’S “SIAMESE TWINS”
An Extraordinary Birth!
    An extraordinary freak of nature has just seen the light at Brighton. A servant girl has given birth to twins who are united at the hips by an indissoluble bond of flesh and bone. The twins are girls. The lower parts of their backbones are grown together so that just behind the hips, the two otherwise independent bodies are one. The union is all the more complete since, between them, the two children have but one set of certain vital organs. In other respects, the children are quite normal. In fact, they are a very healthy lusty young pair, and seemed possessed of uncommonly vigorous life.…
    From Dr. James Rooth, who was kind enough to answer the questions of our representative, we learn that the twochildren obviously possess entirely distinct individualities. One has been noticed to be crying while the other is asleep; one has had certain infantile troubles at a time when the other was unaffected.…
    Whether they can be separated or not is a matter at present of grave doubt. Separation would almost certainly mean that one would have to be sacrificed. At present, both youngsters are full of life; and it cannot be said that one is more vigorous than the other.
    We understood from the doctor that the case is one of an entirely exceptional kind, and is arousing intense interest in the medical profession. Before long the infants will be photographed under the X-rays so that doctors can see exactly how the union has been effected.
    The children have been adopted by Mrs. Hilton, the motherly lady who helped bring them into the world; and one found her keenly excited and solicitous over the welfare of her extraordinary foster children. In all her wide experience, she has never known of such a thing; and she confesses that her emotions were very perturbed when she saw what had come into the world. But she never saw finer babies, and could not wish to have them doing better than they are now.…
    In a sense, Daisy and Violet were adopted not just by Mary and Henry Hilton, but by all of Brighton. As word of the “extraordinary birth” spread, people began appearing at the Queen’s Arms to drop off such items as hand-knit booties, quilts, and dolls. Brightonians were beginning to take pride in the notoriety their town was attracting as the birthplace of genuine Siamese twins. There was a tradition in Europe of celebrating human oddities, among them Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins; General Tom Thumb, the twenty-eight-inch-tall midget;