By this time the younger Howard children were growing, taking up more space, and the house was bursting. John offered to move out, to find a flat and a job of his own. His mother would not hear of his breaking up the family, however, so he decided to run off and enlist in the army.
He went into the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. The older soldiers, Howard found, were ‘very rough and tough. … I freely admit I cried my eyes out for the first couple of nights when I was in the barracks room with these toughs and wondered if I’d survive.’
In fact, he began to stand out. In recruit training, at Shrewsbury, he excelled in sports – cross-country running, swimming, boxing, all things he had done in the Scouts. To his great benefit the British army of 1932, like most peacetime regular armies everywhere, was fanatical about sports competition between platoons, companies, battalions. When John joined his battalion, at Colchester, the company commander immediately made him the company clerk, a cushy job that left him with plenty of free time for sports. Then he was sent on an education course, to learn to teach, and when he returned he was put to teaching physical education and school subjects to recruits, and to competing both for his company and battalion in various events.
That was all right, but John’s ambitions reached higher. He decided to try for a commission, based on his sports record, his educational qualifications – all those night courses – and his high scores on army exams. But getting a commission from the ranks in the peacetime army was almost impossible, and he was turned down. He did get a promotion to corporal, and transferred to teach in the school at the Regimental Depot at Shrewsbury.
And he met Joy Bromley. It was a blind date, John being dragged along simply because his buddy had two girls to look after. Joy was supposed to be his buddy’s date, but John took one look at her and lost his heart forever. Joy was only sixteen (she lied and told John she was seventeen), slim but with a handsome figure, pert in her face, lively in her carriage, quick to laugh, full of conversation. She had come on the date reluctantly – her people were in the retail trade in Church Stretton near Shrewsbury, she had already been dating a boy from Cambridge, and, as she told her friend, ‘I’m not allowed to go out with soldiers’. ‘Well, it’s only for coffee’, her friend persisted, ‘and I’ve made a promise’. So Joy went, and over the coffee she and John talked, the words, the laughs, the stories bubbling out. At the train station, John kissed her good -night.
That was in 1936, and a courtship ensued. At first it was secretive, Joy fearing her mother’s disapproval. They met under a large copper beech tree at the foot of the garden at Joy’s house. John did not much care for this sneaking around, however, and he decided to proceed on a direct line. He announced to Joy that he was going to see her mother. ‘Well, I nearly died’, Joy recalled. ‘I thought mother wouldn’t see him’, and if she did, then ‘she would flail me for making such an acquaintance’. But Mrs Bromley and John got along splendidly; she told Joy, ‘You’ve got a real man there’. In April, 1937, they were engaged, promising Joy’s mother they would wait until Joy was older before marrying.
In 1938, John’s enlistment came to an end. In June, he joined the Oxford City Police force. After a tough, extended training course at the Police College in Birmingham, in which he came in second of 200, he began walking the streets of Oxford at night. He found it ‘quite an experience. You are on your own, you know, anything can happen.’
It was here, on the streets of Oxford at midnight, with the young undergraduates staggering their way home, the occasional thief, the odd robbery, the accidents, the pub staying open after closing hour, that John Howard first came into his own. He had already demonstrated that he was reliable, exceedingly fit, a natural leader in games, a marvellous athlete himself, in short one of those you would look to for command of an infantry platoon, perhaps even a company, in time of war. But these qualities he shared with thousands of other young men. However admirable, they were hardly unique. What was unique was Howard’s love of night. Not because it gave him an opportunity to indulge in some petty graft, or bash in a few heads – far from it. He loved the night because while walking his beat he had to be constantly alert.