Then he tried to become an Air Raid Warden, and suffered another disappointment.
And then he tried all sorts of things.
It's very difficult for old people, for old men particularly, in a war.
They cannot grow accustomed to the fact that there is little they can do to help; they suffer from frustration, and the war eats into them.
Howard fell into the habit of ordering his life by the news bulletins on the wireless.
Each day he got up in time to hear the seven o'clock news, had his bath, shaved, and dressed and was down to hear the eight o'clock, and went on so all day till after the midnight news, when he retired to bed.
Between the bulletins he worried about the news, and read every paper he could lay his hands on till it was time to turn the wireless on again.
He lived in the country when the war broke out.
He had a house at Market Saffron, not very far from Colchester.
He had moved there from Exeter four years previously, after the death of his wife; as a boy he had been brought up in Market Saffron and he still had a few acquaintances in the neighbourhood.
He went back there to spend the last years of his life.
He bought an old country house, not very large, standing in about three acres of garden and paddock.
His married daughter came back from America and lived with him in 1938, bringing her little boy.
She was married to a New York insurance man called Costello, Vice-President of his corporation and very comfortably off.
She'd had a spot of bother with him.
Howard didn't know the ins and outs of it and didn't bother about it much; privately, he was of the opinion that his daughter was to blame for the trouble.
He was fond of his son-in-law, Costello.
He didn't understand him in the least, but he liked him very well.
That's how he was living when the war broke out, with his daughter Enid and her little boy Martin, that his father would insist on calling Junior. That puzzled the old man very much.
Then the war broke out, and Costello began cabling for them to go back home to Long Island.
And in the end they went.
Howard backed up Costello and put pressure on his daughter, in the belief that a woman who is separated from her husband is never very happy.
They went, and he was left to live alone at Market Saffron, with occasional weekend visits from his son John, a Squadron-Leader in the Royal Air Force.
Costello made a great effort, in cables many hundreds of words long, to get the old man to go too.
He wasn't having any.
He said that he was afraid of being in the way, that a third party would have spoilt the chance of reconciliation.
But his real reason, he admitted, was that he didn't like America.
He had crossed the Atlantic to stay with them when they had first been married, and he had no desire to repeat the experience.
After nearly seventy years in a more equable climate he found New York intolerably hot and desperately cold in turns, and he missed the little courtesies to which he was accustomed in our feudal life.
He liked his son-in-law, he loved his daughter, and her boy was one of the great interests in his life.
Not all these motives were sufficient to induce him to exchange the comfort and security of England grappling in battle to the death for the strange discomforts of the land that was at peace.
So Enid and her boy sailed in October.
He took them to Liverpool and saw them on the boat, and then he went back home.
From then onwards he lived very much alone, though his widowed sister came and stayed with him for three weeks before Christmas, and John paid him several visits from Lincolnshire, where he had a squadron of Wellington bombers.
It was lonely for the old man, of course.
In the ordinary way he would have been content with the duck-shooting and with his garden.
He explained to me that he found his garden really more interesting in the winter than in the summer, because it was then that he could make his alterations.
If he wanted to move a tree, or plant a new hedge, or dig out an old one - that was the time to do it.
He took great pleasure in his garden, and was always moving things about.
The war spoilt all that.
The news bulletins penetrated every moment of his consciousness till he could no longer take pleasure in the simple matters of his country life.
He fretted that he could get nothing to do, and almost for the first occasion in his life the time hung heavily on his hands.
He poured his mind out irritably to the vicar one day, and that healer of sick souls suggested that he might take up knitting for the troops.
After that, he took to coming up to London for three days a week.
He got himself a little one-room flat in bachelor chambers, and took most of his meals at the club.
That made things easier for him.
Travelling up to London on Tuesday absorbed the best part of a day, and travelling down again on Friday absorbed another one; in the meantime odd duties had accumulated at Market Saffron so that the week-end was comparatively busy.
In this way he created the illusion that he had enough to do, and he grew happier in consequence.
Then, at the beginning of March, something happened that made a great change in his life.
He didn't tell me what it was.