‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’: The West Indians and the Church in An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym

Passing along the ‘brightly — almost garishly — painted houses’ of the West Indians, Mark Ainger, the male protagonist of An Unsuitable Attachment, an Anglican priest, remembers that it was in this street that his wife Sophia once saw ‘a cluster of what she took to be exotic tropical fruits in one of the windows, only to realise that they were tomatoes put there to ripen. ‘“Love apples”, she had said to Mark, and the words “love apple” had somehow given a name to the district, strange and different as it was from the rest of the parish which lay over the other side of the main road, far from the railway line’ (16).