Patterns in Time

What’s the French for beanbag, I wonder? Surely not 'sac d’haricots', as google would have me believe, literally bag of beans. I think ‘fauteuil de poire’ (pear sofa) is more likely, or the universal ‘pouf’ – not that I think Mémé would ever have made one. She was born in 1898 and lived through two world wars. Googling would have been as alien to my great-grandmother as the details of her daily life would be to me and I suspect she had very little time for messing around with polystyrene balls. From what I can glean she didn’t have much time for anything – living with her very strict grandparents in Sidi-bel-Abess during the weeks while her parents Juan and Antonia Aguilar stayed on their farm in the Moroccan countryside, she and her sister Antoinette were forbidden to play, being taught to sew, knit and crochet instead.
It must have been a relief when she met Grandpere (she was Spanish, he was French – what language did they communicate in?) at a dance and married him on March 6th 1922. He was employed by the Chemin de Fer Marocain, and the couple moved around from Rabat to Marrakesh to Fes, finally settling in Oujda. Along the way Mémé gave birth to Mauricette, my grandmother and, needing material to make clothes, used to go to the fabric markets in Rabat. As this was before sewing machines were widely used, everything had to be made laboriously by hand.
Then, so the story goes, when Mémé was in Oujda in 1933 she won some money on the lottery and bought her first sewing machine, a Singer treadle. The same machine was used to teach her daughter how to sew, and Nanny still has it, sat downstairs in her house in south of France – just like I now have Mum’s Machine, sat, reassuringly, just across the hallway.