In 1927 Vera went into partnership with a friend, and the pair set up their own hat shop, which they called Rose Valois, in the Place Vend?me. By the time war broke out Vera was a successful businesswoman with a fiancé, Charles Dussaix, a Swiss based in Lyons. It is not clear why they did not marry, but in 1940, when Paris was first occupied, she went to live with him intending to leave immediately for England. But once in Lyons she became involved in helping Allied airmen to escape until that became too dangerous. In 1942, needing to get out herself, she joined one of the underground escape routes across the Pyrenees into Spain. She was briefly interned just outside Bilbao, but eventually arrived in England via Gibraltar and immediately offered her services to the various women’s organizations. She was soon picked out by F Section of Special Operations Executive (SOE) because of her perfect French. Her interviewer noted that she was ‘a smart businesswoman and commerce was her first allegiance’, but thought this would not lessen her suitability for the work they had in mind for her. She was almost forty, and she agreed from now on to drop all contact with her fiancé. According to the official report ‘she felt she had jeopardised him enough by letting him hide her while on her way out’.
The SOE had been created by Churchill in 1940 ‘to set Europe ablaze’ by giving support to the local resistance organizations in occupied Europe. Some sixty SOE agents were women, not all of whom were sent into the field. But the forty chosen for F Section were selected partly because it was believed they would blend in better than men in wartime, and could invent a better cover story, especially in Paris where young men were increasingly a rarity.* This was especially important for couriers, carrying messages often for long distances by train or bicycle, and it was thought in London that women who hid messages in their underwear were less likely to be subjected to a body search.
In this tense climate female couriers were a great help to resistance radio operators, as a woman with a transmitter at the bottom of her basket covered with carrots and turnips could pretend she was carrying a heavy shopping bag, whereas a young man carrying a heavy suitcase was immediately suspect and far more likely to be stopped and searched. Nonetheless it was an unprecedented decision for the British to send women into the field, even or especially as volunteers, where they risked capture, brutal interrogation, torture and death. Although Churchill’s approval for using women was never official, when Captain Selwyn Jepson, recruiting officer for F Section, told him of the plans, his response – ‘Good luck to you’ – was always taken as tacit authority. But it could not be revealed to the public at the time that Britain was using women in this way as, under the Geneva Convention, women were not allowed to take on combatant duties so their activities had to be highly secret: one reason why so little was known about many of them until many years later. A team of lawyers was seconded to SOE and it was decided that SOE women should be enrolled into the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, known as FANYs, partly to give them useful cover to tell family and friends, partly to train them in the use of firearms; and also in the vain hope that if captured they would have some military status to protect them according to the Geneva Convention. The female agents of F Section did not always carry weapons and were expected to exploit their femininity to maximize their usefulness.
Vera underwent immediate training and her commandant reported that she was ‘full of guts’, had kept up with the men and was ‘about the best shot in the party … a plumb woman for this work … a woman of outstanding ability and courage and determination’. Another report noted that she was very interested in clothes and hated the hideous khaki uniform she had to wear as a FANY. During the night of 13–14 May, Ensign Vera Leigh, codenamed Simone, was flown back to France and dropped east of Tours in one of the small Lysander aircraft, used not only as they could land without runways but because the lone pilot could fly them low, below enemy radar, with only moonlight to guide him along shiny rivers, lakes or railway line before picking up as well as dropping off those who were not parachuting. She was met by Henri Déricourt, F Section’s Air Movements officer in northern France, and immediately moved back to Paris where she was to be a milliner’s assistant called Suzanne Chavanne working with the Inventor circuit.* With her well-attuned eye for observing fashion, Vera found Paris in many ways unchanged. Women, or at least certain women, were still shopping at the couture houses around the Place Vend?me and the Ritz Hotel, as shown by figures for turnover of couture clothes, as well as surtax paid by customers.? Feeling if not relaxed at least comfortable in her native city, Vera Leigh foolishly even used the same hairdresser she had frequented in pre-war days where they knew exactly who she was, no mere milliner’s assistant, and in addition to her SOE work she continued with her former activities, helping Allied airmen hiding out in various Paris flats who needed escorting through France to Spain often via the Comet line.