The Five of Us – The Life of the Lawson Quins

Being one of five, we feel things even when we don't know or the others aren't there. So I've always said: imagine trying to feel different responses coming from four other people. The messages can get quite mixed up. It's the bond that twins have ... it's this quin bond.

– Deborah

From time to time people would knock on the door and ask, 'when were the children on view?'

– Karitane nurse Margaret Sadler

I used to take them down on a rope, for a walk: tie them together one after another.

– Hilda Menzies, the Lawsons' grandmother

We used to have a lot of cats, I think we had 27 in the end. One day he just lined us up, and he shot all the cats in front of us.

– Sam Lawson, on his abusive step-father

In a New Zealand hospital last week a wonder-struck mother wandered along a row of incubators and gazed down at her newborn quintuplets. [The birth] resulted from fantastic new drugs which enable barren women to conceive — and which are causing a veritable epidemic of quints, quads, triplets and twins around the world.

– Life magazine, 13 August 1965