The wooden chalet book

This wooden-fronted, hand-painted, clothbound book, was found when my mother, sister TML and I were clearing my paternal grandfather's house in 1976. He'd gone to live at Baldersby Park, an old folks' home for obstreperous old codgers, where he raised merry hell, apparently. He was born in the late 19th century and had lived in India when Britannia still ruled the waves, but had begun to lose his grip on modern-day reality. The olden days must have seemed a lot more exciting to him than widowerhood in Fife in the 1970s.

I was only twelve, and regarded the exercise as a hugely exciting treasure hunt. I seized on this book as something that might once have been touched by my father. I hadn't seen him for two years (indeed I have only seen him once since 1974; he was an absent parent) but it seemed to me then that he had written in this book, because
it's one page has been written in, in a language that I cannot decipher. It says:

EZYNA
en
HoiyRna MaRoch
ahl
SiRahne

My father is/was a language lover; the more obscure the better. There's also a rubber stamp on that page, as if it were a passport, that says "Kaunas" which I think is or was the airport of Lithuania! Maybe the language is Russian. There are some marks like upper case Rs which I think is a Cyrllic character. The three Baltic states were forced to adopt Russian as their official language after their period of "decadence" and independence had ended, around 1918, and they were subsumed into the USSR. I've blipped about neighbouring Latvija here.

Now, this looks like a sort of souvenir that might have been bought on a skiing holiday. When they weren't in India, my grandfather's family loved skiing in European resorts. Somewhere there's a photo of him in his heavy wooden skis, still wearing his plus-fours! They don't make them like that any more, not even in Gloucestershire, let alone Fife, where he lived until his old folks' home adventure.

I made it into an autograph book, which was then fashionable among certain young girls, and pestered the family and other randomly selected adults to write in it. As I carried on collecting autographs until the early 80s, intermittently, I have the signatures of the punk poet John Cooper Clarke and the band Stiff Little Fingers (first band I ever saw; Glasgow Apollo, 1980) jostling for space alongside those of long-forgotten school teachers, and one I still remember, who was young, from the US, taught English, and was only with us a year. She read to us from the classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and in my chalet book she wrote:

"Helena,
The most important aspect of true friendship is to understand,
and to be understood in return.
Wishing you friendship and happiness always,
Cathy MacFarlane"

You will notice that the top edge of the wooden book has been chewed. I shall never know who or what attempted to eat it!